Find Living Relatives

Hello,

I am a new member posting from the USA, my apologies if I am posting this in the wrong place.

I am interested in making contact with any direct paternal-line descendant of Thomas Eyre (born 1549 in Salisbury/New Sarum; one time Mayor of Salisbury, and M.P. in 1597).

Our interest is to finally and conclusively link the UK and New England branches of the family by a simple Y-dna test.

The terminal SNP of the American descendants of John Ayer of Haverhill, Massachusetts, who emigrated in 1635, is now known to be R1b>M269>DF27>Z278. The implication of that is that the ancient ancestral origins of this paternal lineage were in the Basque/Gascony region around the Pyrenees. I feel that that fits in well with the traditional view that the Eyres of Wiltshire are descendants of Humphredi LeHeyr and that he, or someone a few generations further back, came to Wiltshire from northern France sometime in the 11-12th centuries.

John Ayer, of Mass. is thought to have been a son of Thomas Eyre, but the historical documentation supporting that is far from conclusive. Any modern Eyre descendant of Thomas Eyre should possess exactly the same terminal SNP, if the families are indeed related. So, a simple DNA test (which would only reveal the y-haplogroup, and no other personal details) would essentially confirm, or refute, that family relationship.

The desired person needs to be a male, with the surname Eyre, or one of its variants, and should have a rock-solid pedigree leading back to Thomas Eyre of Salisbury.

Oh, yes, I should mention that the cost of the test will be covered by the American side, so, for you, it would be FREE.

Even if the results are negative, and the two families are actually not closely related, you would still learn something new about your own ancient ancestry.

Thank you in advance for your consideration,

Michael Ayers
Oregon, USA

Welcome to genesreunited, Michael.

Have you attempted to make contact with any members who have Thomas Eyre in their tree on here?

(Look in Search/Search All Member Trees, top right)

Thanks for your reply, patchem.

Not yet, because there are about 50 members who turn up after a search. As far as I can tell, there is no way to see their trees, or even their surname, without messaging each of them, one by one. Is that correct, or have I missed something?

With my luck, the first 49 people I try will not be Eyres, and that would seem like a big waste if time. I thought I would try posting here first to see if I might find someone faster that way.

Cheers,
Michael

That is correct, Michael - you would have to contact each tree owner individually.

He is in a tree on Ancestry, listed as the husband of Elizabeth Rogers (1549-1612).

There are two dates given for their marriage - 16/04/1567 in Salisbury, and 1570. No source given for 1567, but this given for 1570:

John Thomas Ayer/Eyre
in the Millennium File
Name: John Thomas Ayer/Eyre
Gender: Male
Birth Date: 1549
Birth Place: New Sarum, Dorset, England
Death Date: 10 Sep 1628
Death Place: Salisbury, Wilts, England
Marriage Date: 1570
Father: Robert (Mayor) Eyre
Mother: Jane Joan (Mrs Tourney)
Spouse: Elizabeth Rogers
Children: John Ayre
Spouse Father: John Rogers

Source Information
Heritage Consulting. Millennium File [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2003.
Original data: Heritage Consulting. The Millennium File. Salt Lake City, UT, USA: Heritage Consulting.
Description
The Millennium File contains more than 880,000 linked family records, with lineages from throughout the world, including colonial America, the British Isles, Switzerland, and Germany.



However, the tree only goes down 2 or 3 generations - not to present day.

On the search results page, on the right hand side, there is a Find Out More, button. This frequently reveals the surname of the tree owner when you click on it.
As very few people read these boards (only 28 so far have looked at your posting) then if you want to reach a wider audience I think you would have to try the direct contact email.
Quite a few of those trees look like duplicates, and you can just copy and paste the same message over to each.
Even if the surnames of the tree owners are not Eyre, they could have a mother or grandmother who was an Eyre and might know of a male descendant.

Who do you believe are the sons of Thomas Eyre?

Have you managed to find a will for him?

There are lots of google search results for him, but seems to be lacking in son's marriages and grandsons.

I wonder if you contacted the local paper "Wiltshre Times " either by e-mail or letter and explained your quest they might help or suggest a way forward,they like a good story :-)

www.wiltshiretimes.co.uk

Edit
I hope the line has not "daughtered out" !

Thanks to everyone who replied so far.

I originally omitted some of the details about Thomas Eyre, for the sake of brevity.

He and Elizabeth Rogers had 15 children, including 5 sons who lived to adulthood (6 if you count John Ayer, my ancestor). Therefore is seems unlikely that this line daughtered out at some point. There is a baptism in Salisbury for a John Eyre in 1582, at about the time when my John Ayer should have been born. However, there is also a death record for a John Eyre in 1599 somewhere else (I’m not sure where) and some people think that means that those two were the same person. I believe there is Will for Thomas, but I have not seen it personally. I think some have said that there is no one named John mentioned in the will, but I am not certain of that, and it might not mean anything in any case.

@ ArgyllGran – Yes, that’s them. In fact there are about 7,000 trees on ancestry for that couple, though most of them are, like me, descendants of John Ayer of New England. I have started creating experimental trees on Ancestry extending down from the other sons of Thomas Eyre, and by doing that I just now may have found another member’s that could work. It appears to be owned by a female, so here’s hoping that she has a father, brother, uncle, etc. who fits the bill. Fingers crossed.

@patchem - Ha! Yes, you are right about the “Find Out More” button. I did try that previously, but, by chance the first two trees I clicked on were from people who only gave a first name/alias. Now I have tried them all, and most people do give their surname. But no Eyres so far. Of course, some of the women members may be using their married names, so there is still hope. ;-)

@ ElizabethK – Hey, nice idea about the Wiltshire Times! I may give that a try.

Just for info Michael, it is actually far more effective to contact 50 members than to post here. :-)

Very few people read these boards (as noted, you can see the number of 'views' beside your post in the forum list) -- although it is quite possible that someone might google the name and keywords in your post and find it that way. So make sure you keep a current email address in your account here so you can be contacted in future. Also, click 'Watch This' up at the top and then you should get email notifications of any message posted in this thread.

I checked because my male line is from Wiltshire in the Salisbury area back to the 1500s, just to see whether there might be a happy coincidence, but mine being M223 (I2b1, that I see is now I2a2a) I am immediately ruled out.

I am lucky in one sense - to be here. :-) That line of mine had petered out to one boy and one girl cousin by the mid-1700s from being fairly thick on the ground before that, according to parish records. Mine was the boy, who had only one surviving child, a son, who had only one child, a son. That one kickstarted the clan again: two wives and 10 children, half boys and half girls. But I'm afraid I will find no more distant cousins than them.

Can you say what the source of the hypothesis that your John Ayer of Massachusetts was a son of Thomas Eyre is?

Two brothers with my male-line surname settled in Massachusetts in the 1600s as well, and people in the US have settled on two baptisms in Sussex as being them. I think that's nonsense, since the leader of their group was from Wiltshire, nearby where my people came from, and my bet has always been that they were from my bunch. Unfortunately, a YDNA test on a descendant shows a different haplogroup. But there's a lot of room for NPEs in 300 years, on both sides of the ocean!

So I find the theory of a Wiltshire source reasonable, considering the known Wiltshire-Massachusetts connections (the shared Salisbury place name, for starters, and numerous others). I'm just curious where it originated!

Wiltshire Wills has Thomas Eyre wills with dates of 1631 (grocer, Salisbury) and 1636 (gentleman, Bromham). I haven't looked into deaths, but estates were commonly settled well after death, I think.

https://history.wiltshire.gov.uk/heritage/getwill.php?id=64304

https://history.wiltshire.gov.uk/heritage/getwill.php?id=86161

For those who thought Bromham was in Bedfordshire, there is one in Wiltshire:

http://www.bromhamwiltshire.org

If you know that several of his sons reached adulthood, then perhaps look for wills for them also.

(Most of the trees on ancestry seem to show no male descendants other than the American line)

Just a little update to this thread...

I now am focusing on Galway as the best place to locate a man who can help with this.

One of Thomas Eyre's grandsons, John Eyre, son of Giles Eyre, moved to Galway, and built Eyre Castle, and descendants founded the villages of Eyrecourt and Eyreville. There seem to have been more sons than average in that line, and I have been able to trace a male lineage down to the late 19th/early 20th century so far. Now I have a couple of enquiries made over there to see if anyone useful turns up.

@JoonieCloonie

"Can you say what the source of the hypothesis that your John Ayer of Massachusetts was a son of Thomas Eyre is?"

To try and answer your question; no I can’t give an exact source, because that hypothesis goes back several decades. Most genealogy monographs on this family seem to be sold on the idea that John Ayer was from Wiltshire, though the exact details vary depending on the author (essentially all of the current Internet family stories and Family Trees seem to be based on the works of these earlier researchers, I don't think anyone has examined the primary sources in quite some time.) I was reading one book the other day that was written in 1904, but that one has Robert Eyre of Bromham as the patriarch. The majority, however, claim Thomas as having been his father as the most likely option.

Most of these texts cite the usual type of circumstantial evidence (wills, deed, etc.) but, mainly, the story focuses on the other families that were close associates of John Ayer, especially those that also migrated to Massachusetts at the same time as he did. Those families do have confirmed origins in Salisbury/Wiltshire, and maintained ties to the Ayer family when they arrived in New England. The most often-cited example is John Evered-Webb. He, and others from Wiltshire, sailed to Massachusetts from Southampton in 1635, on the ship “James of London” (*not* on the other ship “James” that almost sank in the Great Hurricane of 1635, as is often claimed). John Ayer does not appear on that, or any other extant, passenger list, but it assumed that he also arrived on the James of London. It is frequently said that John Ayer’s wife “Hannah” was actually John Evered-Webb’s sister, though some researchers adamantly disagree with that. Though their exact relationship is unclear, it must have been fairly close, as John Evered-Webb left a certain amount of cash to all of John Ayer’s children in his will.

This is why a genetic test would go a long way to clearing up this foggy story. Though it would not prove John was Thomas’s son, it would confirm that they were of the same family lineage, which would be good enough for me.

Hopefully someone in Galway, or elsewhere, who can help will be found before too long.

Happy New Year, Wiltshire :-)
Michael

Michael, that all seems quite reasonable to me ... given that I'm predisposed
to Wiltshire as a source of Massachusetts settlers anyway. :-D

based on the evidence of those ties that I knew of too, of course!

I wish my Wiltshire male-line DNA could help, but I-M223 is an outlier, I'm afraid.
Those Hertfordshire Quakers are the closest thing I have to a match of any kind
(other than the 100% match with the grx2 grson of my grx2 grfather).