Jane Davididson (52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks 2025, Week 4 - "Overlooked")

Jane Davididson was overlooked for years. First, she simply wasn't named in any available records, but even after coming across her name, I  considered her a stepmother to my maternal line 3rd great grandmother Jane Murdie (or Murdy) and continued to pay her little attention. 

Mitochondrial DNA is passed from a mother to all her children but only daughters pass that on to the next generation. My mitochondrial haplogroup H2a1 came down my female line from Jane Murdie, and also from her mother, quite possibly the woman named Jane Davididson.

I suspect the reason for my oversight was the wording in the "Source Book for the Bullen Family" collected and compiled in the 1930s by Myrtle Bullen Nelson and Ruth Dunlop, quoting from a letter written by Jane Murdie's granddaughter Mrs. A. H. Nelson: 

My grandmother's (Jane Murdy) father died and her mother married a Mr. Chambers who was the father of Mary and Kate Chambers.

I interpreted that to mean that Mr. Chambers was Mary and Kate's father but, no mention being made of their mother, it wasn't the same unnamed woman who was Jane Murdy's mother but some other unknown previous or subsequent wife. When I later came upon several unsourced references to Jane Davididson as the mother to the Chambers daughters, it still did not occur to me that she might also be Jane Murdie's mother.

Piecing together the sequence of events without much in the way of documentation, it seems Jane Murdie's mother had married Mr. Murdie in Scotland, came to Hannibal, Oswego, New York where daughter Jane was born in 1801 (or possibly as late as 1808). Mr. Murdie headed west on business with a fine herd of horses but was never seen again, eventually being presumed dead. 

Without finding any death or marriage records to pinpoint dates, there are a couple of possible scenarios that fit the known events. First possibility is that by about 1817 the widow Murdie married John Chambers and had 3 daughters with him: Mary born 1818, Louisa born 1820 and Catherine "Kate" born 1823, the same year Jane Murdie married David Bullen. (This may seem like a huge gap between the birth of Jane and of the younger girls but is certainly quite possible, especially given the circumstances.) 

Kate Chambers Gilmore Griggs, daughter of Jane Davididson and possible half sister of Jane Murdie

Another possibility is that Jane Davididson died sometime after 1823 and John Chambers then married the widow Murdie, Jane's mother, whose name remains unknown. 

Jane Murdie married David Bullen in Hannibal, Oswego, N.Y in 1823. When the Bullens moved from New York to Wisconsin, the Chambers soon moved there too. The 3 Chambers girls all married and had families. One of the few pieces of documentation that has been located is the obituary for daughter Kate.

Obituary of Kate Chambers, La Grange WI 23 August 1900

Although only one sister (Louisa) is said to have survived Kate, it is noteworthy that "Mrs. David Bullen" (Jane Murdie) attended from a distance. Clearly they had been close to justify this travel. Were they half sisters or step-sisters? 

The lack of documentary evidence leaves the possibility of using DNA to solve the mystery. Although I have tried to find an appropriate descendant of one of the 3 Chambers girls who would be able to take a mitochondrial DNA test to see if they too have the haplogroup H2a1, their families seem to have "sonned out", leaving no likely candidates. (One autosomal match does descend from a Chambers sister but that could be from any number of ancestral lines.) Although we still cannot know for certain whether Jane Davididson was Jane Murdie's mother, at least now she is no longer being overlooked.