Over a Brick Wall: Nicholas Louis Saum (1735-1809) (52 Ancestors 2020 Week 41) Theme: "Newest"

Background - Discovering Nicholas through DNA

Copious hours of DNA analysis have moved me past my toughest brick wall to discover the paternal line of my great grandfather Charles Francis Edwards. I can say with some certainty that his father's paternal line leads back to immigrant ancestor Nicholas Saum who came to America from the Rhine River Valley in 1752. This whole branch of my tree is my newest genealogical discovery made possible by the newest genealogical tools.

When Charles Francis Edwards was born in What Cheer, Keokuk, Iowa on 22 February 1869, his mother Barbara (Hoover) Edwards was between husbands. Her second husband, Lewis Edwards, had died at the end of the Civil War on 18 February 1866. She did not marry her third husband, George W. Payton, until 1873. With no record of who his father was, it is certainly easy to understand why Charles went through life claiming to be an orphan. I don't know whether his mother ever divulged the name of his father to Charles, but, if she did, he did not pass that information down in the family. Without any written records, we were stymied. 

Stymied, that is, until DNA became available to family historians. For good or ill, many carefully hidden secrets have been revealed in the past few years, often much to the surprise of the tester! 

After just a bit of persuasion, a cousin of my mother's who is a male descendant of Charles Edwards agreed to take a Y chromosome test. Since the Y chromosome is passed down almost unchanged from father to son to grandson, generation after generation, it can yield strong evidence of the male line of ancestors. Just 2 surnames were indicated by his DNA results with a Saums match being the closer of the two. That match indicated a likelihood of my mother's cousin and his Saums Y DNA match sharing a common male ancestor within a handful of generations. I created a tree for the extended Saum(s) family and expanded it as much as possible (it now has some 900 individuals in it). 

Next, I moved on to analyzing all the autosomal DNA matches of various family members who have tested to see if any of the other 22 sets of chromosomes led to DNA matches to anyone in the extended Saum tree that I had created. Bingo! Dozens of our matches were indeed descendants of Nicholas Saum! 

There was one particular family that represented DNA lines for both Saum and Henderson families, two names that kept cropping up regularly in a group of our family matches, sometimes together and sometimes just one or the other.  This family had three sons born between 1822-1834 who were possible candidates for being the unknown father for Charles. Two of them lived in Iowa and the third in Kansas. All three brothers are possibilities. In jumping over my brick wall to find immigrant ancestor Nicholas Saum, I am breaking a genealogical rule: I am skipping a generation. I don't know for certain which brother is my ancestor, but am quite sure of our descent from Nicholas. 

(One of the genetic analytical tools available is called "What are the Odds" on the DNA Painter website. This gives mixed results, depending on which family tester's results are being used. One gives the greatest likelihood to the oldest of the 3 brothers, also named Charles. Another tester's results show all three brothers about equally likely. With no clear answer,  I will certainly continue to use all the tools as they become available in genetic genealogy to try to pinpoint who fathered Charles.)

Nicholas Saum is almost certainly Charles Edwards' 2X great grandfather and my 5X great grandfather. Not a single document has been found (or is ever likely to be found!) to confirm this relationship.

Nicholas Saum's Story

Nicholas Louis Saum was born 1735, in Miesbach, Bayern, Germany. 

Bavarian birthplace of Nicholas Saum (green pin)
Google Earth image

Nicholas would have been about 17 when he and his two older brothers boarded the ship Richard and Mary at Rotterdam and headed to Pennsylvania, where they landed on 26 September 1752. The passenger list spells the 3 brothers names differently - Samm/Saamm. The other passengers were also German men, all probably young and coming to America to improve their fortunes. 

 

After arriving, Nicholas served five years as a redemptioner, as did about half the German immigrants at that time. This was the old apprenticeship system allowing immigrants to reimburse  passage money and expenses through a specified period of indentured servitude.  We don't know exactly who Nicholas worked for, but he does show up in both Pennsylvania and Maryland prior to his move to the beautiful Shenandoah Valley of Virginia where his family founded the small village of Saumsville. 

Location of Saumsville west of Washington D.C.

Nicholas was married at least three times. His marriage to Frances Deupes about 1760 in Maryland led to a family of six children: Frederick, Catherine, Mary, Magdalene, Jacob and Maria Elizabeth. After Frances's death in about 1781, he married Margaret Helmic on 14 September 1781 in the Shenandoah Valley; they had one child, Adam prior to her death in 1784. For his third wife, Nicholas married Mary Ann Shaver on 8 September 1784, also in the Shenandoah Valley, and by her he had four more children: John, Daniel, Christian and Eve.

Nicholas died on 1 April 1809 at Saumsville; he was 74 years old.  My newest family line descending from him has been found thanks to the newest genealogical tools available. 

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