My great-great-great-grandfather, Martin Gentry Jr. (1789-1827) married Delphia Herne (1791-?) on 12 January 1807 in Garrard County, Kentucky. Both Martin & Delphia were reported to be from Albemarle County, Virginia. Martin had moved with his birth family to Madison County, Kentucky (adjacent to Garrard County) in the first decade of the 1800’s, originally to Fort Boonesborough. Delphia’s family would likely have come to Kentucky about the same time. According to the book, “The Gentry family in America, 1676 to 1909”, after having at least six children, Martin and Delphia separated and Martin was reported to have two more sons with a second wife in Indiana while Delphia supposedly took her underage children to Pike County, Missouri.
I have been looking for Delphia’s birth family for a long time. The only clue I had was her marriage registration. Despite the spelling, it gives the following information: “Martin Jentry was married to Delphy Hern on 12 January 1807 by Peter Bainbridge with the marriage bond provided by John Hern and, because the bride was underage at the time, consent of the father, Owen Hern, was obtained”.
That much of the story has long been known to the family and is pretty well documented on Ancestry. I could find no documentation or information about Owen or the rest of his family.
This past month I thought I had broken though that wall but it’s more like a gentle knocking on the door that is slowly getting louder.
While looking in Ancestry at my closest DNA matches who I had not yet identifed, I saw a few that were related to each other with a common ancestors coming from Warren and Edmonson counties, Kentucky. As I always do with such groupings, I tried to find their common ancestors which, theoretically, should point towards my common ancestor with them.
Here is when I got excited. I could trace the whole group to the common ancestors, William Thomas Grubbs (1720-1776) and his wife, Susanna Herne (1729-1817). Thomas and Susanna were married in Albemarle County, Virginia around 1743 and moved with their ten children to Kentucky about 1775. They managed to reach Bryan’s Station, near modern day Lexington, around 1776 but Thomas soon passed away. Susanna then took her children southward to Madison County. It wasn’t long before I found old books on Ancestry that mentioned Susanna’s parents… Owen and Catherine Herne.
That is when I shrieked. I reckoned that I had found Dephia’s sister and mother. I happily started documenting the first several generations of Grubbs as well as the lines down to my Ancestry DNA matches. This expansion of the tree led to other likely descendants of the Grubbs that have had their DNA tested on Ancestry. I was starting to get overwhelmed by the numbers of people when I finally saw the obvious elephant in the room. Susanna was born in 1729. Delphia was born in 1791. The chance of them being sisters is zero. Assuming Owen was at least 18 years older than Susanna, he would have been 96 years old when he granted Delphia permission to get married. That’s even less likely than him fathering her when he was 80 years old.
It’s back to the drawing board with the Herne family. I can’t, however, deny the DNA matches, nor the geographic connections and similar names. I’m certain that I'm related to the Grubbs but I don’t know exactly how. At the moment, I am going with the theory that when Susanna moved to Kentucky with her husband and children, the living members of her birth family stayed in Virginia. I have seen one completely undocumented tree on the internet that Susanna had siblings named William, Mary and Owen Jr. This second brother, Owen Jr., who was reportedly born in 1726, could possibly be Delphia’s father. If that is the case, I have a lot of 6th cousins who I share 24-29cM of DNA with which is actually more than I share with the 4th cousins in the Martin Gentry & Delphia Herne branch. Perhaps Owen Jr. was the grandfather instead of the father of my Delphia. I don’t know. I'm still looking.
As of today, I have traced, documented and confirmed ten Ancestry DNA matches of mine who are descendants of Susanna Herne Grubbs through four different children of hers. There are several more matches that I am still working on. I have also found a transcription of the 1750 will of Catherine Steward (Owen Herne Sr.’s wife) who mentions her children as: Owen Ahern, William Ahern, Susanna Grubbs, Ann Pierson and Mary Hix. She also mentioned her son-in-law Thomas Grubbs.
