When I began researching the Shane family, the trail ran cold at a William Sheehan, born in 1774, who married a Hannah Light in 1800 in Frederick County, Virginia. Some had speculated on Ancestry that William was the son of Timothy Sheehan, who lived in the VA/MD area and was a veteran of the Revolutionary War. However, there was nothing substantiating this claim, and what information about Timothy’s family there was didn’t seem to fit with the dates required for William.
Mr. Kerns’ indispensable book, Some First Families of Back Creek Valley, speculated that William Sheehan was related to the other Sheehan/Shane family in neighboring Berkeley County, WV, who date from the 1790s in that area. It seemed likely, but again, there was no documentation.
With all these theories swirling around, I tested my y-dna line (the dna that is passed with very little change from father to son over generations, making it especially suited to surname research) with FamilyTreeDNA about a decade ago. Even back in those days, when the level of detail provided was still very scant, the results showed immediately that we were not matching other Sheehans. We were getting all Irish matches, but no Sheehans. It seemed to indicate (and I found out later, it DID indicate) that we were not “genetic” Sheehans: meaning, at some point, we had taken the name Sheehan, either through an adoption, illegitimacy, or a willful choice on the part of an ancestor at some point in history.
As the science progressed, I upgraded my test at each opportunity. Finally, with the Big Y upgrade, we were able to see what our SNP “branch” was. When you find your SNP branch, you’ve basically reached about the highest level of certainty regarding your male line’s placement in the overall human family tree. FTDNA estimated my SNP branch, named BY201807 (also called a “haplogroup”), as originating around 1750 AD. That was only 24 years before William Sheehan’s birth! It seemed fairly certain, then, that either William or his father (who we would learn was named Michael) was also positive for BY201807.
To confirm this, though, it was lucky that another descendant of William Sheehan decided to take the Big Y. This Shane male descended from a different son of William (through John), while I descended through the son Andrew William. That means the most recent common ancestor for this Shane and myself was born 249 years ago. Yet, this Shane’s Big Y test results came back identical to mine, haplogroup-wise: positive for BY201807. We had therefore double-confirmed the genetic signature of the Shane family!
And with that discovery, it became even clearer we weren’t Sheehans–they seem to have split off from our line roughly 1,500 years ago (source: McCarthy: Irish Type II Tree Mutation Age Block Table). I actually tracked down a descendant of the Berkeley County Shanes who lived in Oregon and tested his SNP branch via ySeq, a company that does quick and easy DNA tests for targeted questions like this. He came up as a match for the main group of Sheehans who split from us 1,500 years ago. So William Sheehan was not related to these Berkeley County Shanes, one county over.
Sheehan genetic lineage: CTS4466>S1115>Z3023> FGC84010>A541>S1121>Z16252>A159>BY2881>BY149>A923
Our Shane genetic lineage: CTS4466>S1115>Z3023>FGC84010>A541>S1121>Z16252>A9005>FGC29068>BY2880>BY43744> FGC17180>A2224>BY201782>BY201596>BY201807
I tested two Sheehans from Ireland, one from Virginia, and one from the UK in like manner. They all matched the “true” Sheehan family and not us. Based on this random sampling, it seemed there weren’t many Sheehans like us, and that the name change to Sheehan probably happened fairly recently. I noticed a genetic similarity to the Moriarty clan based on the FTDNA project I was a part of (CTS4466+ group). I tested two random Moriartys from Ireland. They came up as closer to us (diverging from us roughly 1,100 years ago), but still not close enough to reveal what our surname was.
Finally, some people tested Big Y that were closely enough related to us that our original surname became clear. Two distantly related Cashman families came up positive for FT416178, whose parent was BY201596. Our branch, BY201807, also had BY201596 as its parent branch. FTDNA and independent researcher Nigel McCarthy estimated BY201596 originated about 1200 AD, while its child FT416178 originated in 1700 AD and its other child, our branch of BY201807, originated in 1750 AD.
It’s important to keep in mind that surnames originated around 1000 to 1100 AD in Ireland. So if you share a common ancestor with someone that lived AFTER that date, you can start to get a clue what the common surname was. In this case, there was another Kissane family descending from BY201596. That meant at around 1200 AD, the ancestor of all three of our families was probably named Kissane/Cashman (the two names are equivalent in Ireland), since two of those families still had that surname hundreds of years later (in such a situation it’s more likely that the family with the different surname–Shane in this case–was the one that changed surnames). (There’s also another Kissane family on the right side of the chart below–at this point, they seem to be a case of another, unrelated family taking the Kissane name.)
So we were originally Kissanes, then. At a deeper level, Nigel McCarthy had compared the structure of the genetic tree that was uncovered through the CTS4466+ project with the ancient Irish genealogies and found a remarkable degree of correspondence. His seminal work, posted on his website, shows that we are part of the Eoghanacht tribal grouping. These are Irish clans and families that descend from Eoghan Mor, estimated to have been born around 165 AD. They were the rulers of southwestern Ireland for hundreds of years. The Kissanes, and by extension our Shane family, were far-removed Irish aristocrats, then. Our specific line did not inherit the kingship of any part of Ireland starting around 800 AD, and so our line went into obscurity at that point (with our last “noble” ancestor probably being someone named Donn Creigheach). (Source: https://mccarthydna.files.wordpress.com/2021/04/ailill-olom-progeny-alignment-2021-04-14.pdf)
But I mentioned earlier William’s father being named Michael. How do we know that? For that, we turn to traditional genealogy.
As I said, William was genetically unrelated to most (if not all) of the other Sheehans in the vicinity of northern Virginia at the end of the 1700s. That didn’t help much in finding out who his parents were, at least at first. However, on a random trip to Putnam County, Ohio, a few years back, I stumbled across a book of community profiles written around the year 1900. They featured prominent citizens of the county and gave short biographies about them. One was a William Shane, who was revealed to be the grandson of William Sheehan. In this profile, the younger William stated that his grandfather had been born in Germany and emigrated to the US and Virginia.
This is a very important piece of information, even though it probably seems very confusing–didn’t we just say it was proven the family came from Ireland? Consider these facts, however:
-William Sheehan died in 1814 from either a wound or a sickness sustained during the Battle of Baltimore. This was before his grandson William was born.
-William married into a heavily German family. The Lights were “Pennsylvania Dutch” and had not yet intermarried with non-Germans until Hannah Light married William.
-If William was the first of his family to emigrate, and if his wife’s family still had a strong association with its German heritage, and if William’s children were all still fairly young when he died (the oldest being about ten at the time), then it’s not hard to imagine how the story of his origins could’ve become garbled. He WAS an immigrant, but it was his wife’s family that was from Germany. As the sole Irish influence on the family, that aspect of the heritage could’ve become overshadowed fairly quickly in light of his premature death and the numerous German family members the young Sheehan family had.
The second big clue was something the Ancestry World Explorer feature brought to light: a baptism record in Tralee, County Kerry, Ireland, for a William Sheehan, from the year 1774! As a Catholic country, baptisms occurred within days after birth in Ireland. Also, Tralee is in the southwest of Ireland, the very place where the y-dna test said all our closest genetic matches were from. So here we have someone with the right name, the right birth year, and the right place (based on the genetic matches) to who our William Sheehan was.
When you combine the remembrance of his grandson that stated that William Sheehan was an immigrant, with the fact that we didn’t match any of the other Sheehans genetically, with the fact that a baptism (which is in effect a birth record) perfectly matched William’s profile, you get a near open-and-shut case that William Sheehan was the first of our line to step foot in the New World, and that he came from southwestern Ireland. The Kissanes, who we were a part of before we changed our name, are most numerous right around Counties Kerry and Cork, in the southwest of Ireland.
So that is the story of how we solved the riddle of William Sheehan. We are still looking for the record of what happened between his baptism in 1774 and his marriage to Hannah Light in 1800. Ideally, we would find a record of ship passage across the Atlantic. However, this record may not exist. Regardless, the search continues for more details about the lives of all of our illustrious ancestors.