Hezekiah Phillips (1780-1855) North/South Carolina - Georgia - Alabama

Hi Nancy,

Thanks for the imput ...... We were quite suprised to find this side of the house with Semetic markers and heritage .......Oral history passed on in our family was of Scottish heritage ....All 3 male yDNA lines support this [WISE, PHILLIPS, CREECH] ....... but my suspicion has been that this is through one of the unknown female iines of the 3 male groups which can probably only be unraveled with autosomal and hopefully with mtDNA, though I have not located a direct female only line to test for any of the 3 groups yet .... I tested mtDNA-HV but it runs up the wife of Henry CREECH and have only had a handful of matches either at FTDNA or mitosearch.com .....

One major obstacle in paper research for the early Coffee Co., AL families is the loss of many records due to repeated floods that damaged many courthouse records, and then tracking back to both GA and SC which likewise have missing records along the migration paths these people took .... So after 34 years traditional research and 7 years of DNA research, I am willing to sponsor specific testing when and if we can locate direct line females off of Hezekiah Phillips, James MacKinney Wise, and Henry Creech, as well as consider sponsoring autosomal testing for the same .... I also would consider sponsoring a yDNA test for one of Hezikiah Phillips' other male lines so that we can get confirmation back to Hezekiah himself on the R-M222 designation .....

It had been my hopes to resolve this lineage while my grandmother was still living but she unfortunetly passed recently at age 991/2 (her lineage carried the longevity gene) but I did promise her I would keep working on this for the family .......

I suspect Joshua and I have been stomping around the same ground for some time now, and running into the same road blocks .......

Thank you Nancy for putting together such a great yDNA site and this forum ....... very nice .......
Deborah

It is interesting the McNeely surname is found in Northern Ireland and in the Ulster region where there was a plantation ran by a Phillips, many different angles, but I agree - the more I research this line the more I think the Phillips surname derives from either something of a spin off or a non-paternal jump in surname, either way it has made researching my family extremely difficult.

Going a bit out on a limb, but I wonder if genetically our lineage is McNeely (or the countless variations of it) and that family moved to Ulster/Londonberry during the time of the plantation "operated" by Sir Thomas Phillips, could have been a surname transition then?

Interesting, would it be value added to further my DNA testing or a different variation of testing to possibly shore this up?