The Mysterious George McClure Bradberry

(Written in Feb 2015)

If you are not interested in our Bradberry family history, go ahead and delete now. If you are interested, here is a mystery for you. First the background -

For a long while, we have traced our paternal line to John and Sarah Bradberry, who by 1840 were farming in Weakley County, TN and then moved in the late 1850s to Crowley’s Ridge in northeast Arkansas. Their son George McClure Bradberry married Healon Alice Fite in Marmaduke, and (as they say) the rest is history. We did not know who John or Sarah’s parents were (we still don’t know about Sarah’s background). A few years ago Mary (Tistie) Price commissioned a professional researcher to find John’s family background. The resulting report can be read at www.unm.edu/~litchman/John-Bradbury.pdf

Prof. Litchman has published an exemplary article in which he makes a compelling case that John Bradberry was one of several sons of Richard and Ann Bradberry of King William County, VA. After Richard’s death about 1826, Ann and most of her children moved west; by 1840 John and Sarah were in Weakley County along with another brother James, and by 1850 they were joined by several other brothers and their families. All this information is solid and well documented. But now the mystery - we do not know who George McClure Bradberry’s father was.

Benton Bradberry and Brent Bradberry (me) are second cousins; both greatgrandsons of George McClure Bradberry (hereafter GMB). Benton traces his line to Charles, the oldest son of GMB, while my line is to a younger son, George Dee Bradberry. We have both had our Y DNA tested for genealogical purposes, and Ben and I are identical on a standard set of 37 markers. By triangulation, this means that GBM had exactly the same values on those markers.

There is a large cluster of Bradberrys still living in or near Weakley County, TN. So far as we know, all of them are descended from one or another of the sons of Richard and Ann Bradberry. Recently one of these Bradberry men had his Y DNA tested. I was quite confident that he would match Ben and me. But not only did he not match us; instead he matched another Bradberry family which I had thought was not related to the Weakley county cluster. This other cluster of families is largely in Georgia and they trace their paternal line to Lewis Bradberry of Henry County, VA.

Lewis Bradberry (probably born in the 1750s) and Richard Bradberry (probably born about 1775) lived in opposite ends of Virginia but were clearly closely related, since their  descendants’ Y DNA match closely. Lewis and Richard may have been brothers, father and son, cousins, etc - in any case the Bradberry clusters in Tennessee and Georgia represent one large family. And the descendants of GMB are not members of that family.  

Based on the DNA evidence at hand, I must conclude that John Bradberry was not the biological father of George McClure Bradberry. We have no DNA evidence to prove whether or not Sarah was his biological mother, and we probably never will. I think it is likely that neither John nor Sarah was a biological parent of GMB for these reasons:

GMB was an only child in a time and place where large families were the norm.

He was born in 1846; by this time John and Sarah had been a childless couple for at least 6 years and perhaps longer.

Had GMB been born to Sarah as a result of a traumatic circumstance such as rape or an adulterous affair, we could expect some uproar (divorce, the John Bradberry family moving away, being shunned by neighbors); instead they seem to have been a close family with normal relations with their relatives and neighbors).

I suspect that GMB was adopted by John and Sarah, but have found no evidence yet. Adoptions were frequently not recorded, especially if the child was a relative. For example, the death rate of women in childbirth was alarmingly high. Suppose Sarah’s sister died in childbirth leaving the father with an infant son. It would have seemed natural for Sarah to raise her nephew as her own son. While I’m speculating, the name McClure may have been Sarah’s maiden name, but we have seen no proof of that. Perhaps GMB was born as George McClure and became George McClure Bradberry upon adoption. In any case, we have a cold case to solve, and I welcome any and all suggestions for areas to research.

In searching for GMB’s father, we are looking for a man who matches the GMB Y DNA, carried now by Ben and me (as well as the other male line descendants of GMB). My Y DNA is on file in several research projects, and we know quite a bit about it. My close “genetic cousins” are clustered in 3 main geographic areas - northern England and Scotland (Whitehead, Foster, Buie, Moore); the Danish -German border (Schwartz, Molitor, and others); and the Eastern Baltic (several names ending in “ski”). Some experts think that our ancient ancestor was Danish, and his descendants spread the DNA eastwards as Vikings and westwards as Normans. So while GMB’s father may have had a typical English or Scottish name it is also possible that he was an immigrant from, say, Germany.

Please feel free to do whatever you like with this report: delete it, keep it, share it with

others. The search continues....