CURRENT STATUS

10 March 2008 - We now have 6 results, and they so far confirm every aspect of the Hawk tree that the paper trail has suggested, and additionally the DNA testing has linked our Georgia line back to an older Pennsylvania line. The truly astonishing thing about our results is that out of six tests at 43 markers each, five results were identical and the sixth result differed by only a one-step mutation on one marker. Although this is within the study's expectation rate, most researchers see more mutations in their family lines. My conclusion is that this Hawk DNA is some stubborn stuff. Moreover, although we are assuredly within the I1a haplogroup, our particular haplotype has some very unusual marker values. When I first tested myself and compared myself to the "norm" values for I1a, I felt I must be some kind of alien. Now we have five more confirming tests, and as the DNA tested population grows, we'll learn how we fit with the rest of I1a.

Descendants of the following lines have now been genetically proven to share a common Hawk ancestry: Thurman and Hillsman Hawk of Walton County, Ga.; Daniel Hawk of Heard County, Ga.; James Madison Hawk of Marshall County, Ala.; James M. Hawk of Troup County, Ga.; and John S. Hawk of Berks County, Pa. There is one remaining branch of Hawk that has surviving male descendants that has not yet been tested, and that is the south Georgia line of Randolph, Calhoun and Crisp (etc.) counties.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to express my thanks to Douglas M. Mumma (doug@mumma.org) for the use of his DNA project template. It was Doug's outstanding work on my father-in-law's paternal line that convinced me this DNA thing is the real deal. Further, I want to acknowledge the men I have come to think of as the 3 B's: Bert Hawk, Buddy Hawk, and Bill Hawk. It was Bert Hawk who had the Aleck Hawk descendancy already figured out. I got the chance to meet him on July the 4th or 5th in 1999, and he gave me a box full of family group sheets, not on just the Hawks, but also on the Malcoms. Buddy Hawk was the man who got the DNA project rolling when he called me up out of the blue one day and said let's get on it. Bill Hawk is a gentleman I discovered soldiering along in Pennsylvania, both of us oblivious to any connection until the DNA results were available. He has since dug up many Berks County records that I'll be mulling over for years.

PROJECT INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND

I formed the Hawk Surname DNA Project at DNA Heritage (online at DNAHeritage.com) on 31 August 2006. My primary goal was to define the descendancy tree of Andrew Hawk, who was known to be farming near Augusta, Georgia, in 1789. Traditional genealogy methods had suggested that Andrew is the root ancestor of most of the Hawk lines of Georgia and eastern Alabama at the present day. Some of these lines adopted the Haulk or Hawke surname.

My use of the term "suggested" above is deliberate. We simply had no document that said, "B is the child of A," except for Seaborn Hawk's journal entry, and before I began the project, Seaborn's word was doubted. Even if we had accepted him at face value, however (and we now have no reason not to), we have lacked a document that maps the third-generation Hawk people to those of the second generation - Jacob, William, Peter, and Andrew (Jr.)

* In September 2006, results from the first two samples confirmed a 43-marker exact match between a descendant of William Hawk of Morgan County, Georgia, and a descendant of James M. Hawk of Elmore County, Alabama. The latest possible birthdate for the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) between these two gentlemen is about 1780.

* In October 2006, an exact 43-marker match was found with a descendant of John Hawk of Franklin County, Pennsylvania. Consequently, I have expanded the original scope of the project to welcome participants from the Franklin County, PA, Hawk line(s), as we work together to determine our common ancestry.

* In January 2007, an exact 43-marker match was found with a descendant of Hillsman Hawk of Walton County, Georgia. All those old tales that one of the Hawk brothers was an Indian? Dismissed.

* In July 2007, a descendant of the William H. Hawk line of Troup County, Ga., checked in, with identical 43 marker results to the rest of us. This is the line that normally traces its descendancy from James Madison Hawk of Marshall County, Alabama, but I always get the James Madison Hawk and James M. Hawk lines confused. And anyway, William H. and James M. were of the same generation; James Madison was one generation later.

* In February 2008, a descendant of the Daniel Hawk line of Heard County, Ga., broke ground with the first mutation in the project. You have no idea how much hair I was pulling out over the identical results. You see, one of my little hopes was that each Hawk line would have some unique characteristic that would differentiate it from the rest, and that we could use those to figure out who the sons of the second generation were. We may still get there, but it will take a more detailed test to do so. I have splurged on a 67-marker test for myself through Family Tree DNA, but I draw the line at asking current project participants to ante up to that.

That's where we stand today. Although I have to this point pitched it as a project to confirm the paper trail, the fact is that I suspect there may be survivors from the Spalding County line (perhaps from the Richard C. Hawk born about 1870), there may be men who went farther west than Alabama in the 1830s and 1840s, and there may be connections with the Pennsylvania line that we don't yet know of. Essentially, the project is open to any man with a Hawk, Hawke, Haulk, or similar surname who wishes to sign on board.

The one thing I am pretty sure of after ten years of research is that the Hawks surname is not at all related to us. Men with the Hawks surname are encouraged to join the Hawks project at Family Tree DNA. The FTDNA Hawks project participants at this time appear to be predominantly R1b haplogroup, whereas our Hawk project participants are all at this time I1a haplogroup. The two groups clearly have separate deep ancestral origins.

QUESTIONS

* What is our origin? Where did we come from? Weren't there Indians?
* Well in that case, how did we get the Hawk name? * Are the various Hawk branches related?
* Is Andrew Hawk our common ancestor?
* Are we related to other Hawk lines, for example the Ohio line?

ANSWERS

What is our origin? Where are the Indians?

Our common haplogroup is I1a. This is Anglo-Saxon DNA, and it is localized in Denmark and western Germany. Aha! Viking blood, you say, triumphantly. Well, it's hard to say. The haplotype appears to be about nine thousand years old. And the historical data is supportive of a Germanic origin to the Hawk line. I keep thinking of the "German bible" that Seaborn was reputed to have had. However, the DNA can’t tell us when the emigration event occurred – whether it was three hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago. Did our paternal fathers storm the coasts of England with a Viking crew, and later settle in England? Or did they stay put in perhaps the Palatinate until the famine of the 1730s? What were their movements? DNA is unlikely to help us here. But we do know for certain now that our Y-chromosome is not from a Native American tribe. This means there is no Native American paternal founder to our Hawk line, and therefore a common family oral tradition is dispelled. Poof. One fell swoop.

What is unique about our haplogroup is that although we have the key I1a markers, some of our other markers don’t conform to any of the known sub-clades for I1a.

So, about this Hawk surname...?

Easy. It wasn't Hawk. It was Haack in the Pennsylvania records. Before that, who knows. Perhaps Haak or Haag, with the umlaut over the a. In other words, it was pronounced like "Hock" with a gargling sound in the middle. Say that a few times in your best German voice. I think you'll agree that "Hawk" is incredibly more pleasant on the ear and throat. It was spelled that way in the very first Georgia record I have found, a 1784 bounty warrant for "Andrew Hawk".

And by the way, I'm always interested in hearing how the various lines pronounce it. I've always said it something like "Haulk" though without any clear "L" sound, and I've had numerous people ask "H-A-U-L-K?" It's just the way my dad said it.

Are the various Hawk branches related?

Yep. Ours, anyway. Test results show conclusively that all current participants are closely related. How closely? Well, DNA population study is a science of statistical probability. All we can really say at this point is that we're close. The genetic evidence supports a scenario in which we all descend from Andrew Hawk, so for now I'll invoke the Occam's Razor rule and go with the simplest scenario that supports the evidence, and that's it.

Are we related to other Hawk lines, for example the Ohio line?

We are not related to the Ohio line(s) of Hawk. We’re not even the same haplogroup. We're about as far away as we can get. The Pennsylvania connection was a huge surprise to me. But we now have evidence that our Andrew resided in Maryland for a time, and I think it's likely he spent a while in Virginia, before he ended up near Augusta in 1789. Did he leave male descendants in those places? DNA testing could sure help us figure it out.

HISTORICAL SETTING OF THE ANDREW HAWK OF GEORGIA LINE

Augusta, Georgia, in 1789 was frontier, and in fact Hawk records show a migration pattern that follows the frontier westward. The Revolutionary War surged back and forth through Augusta and the coastal town of Savannah. As late as 1780 the British took Augusta. American forces recaptured it in 1781 and the same year it was briefly named the Georgia capitol. Cherokee and Creek Indian tribes in the Georgia territory fought on the side of the British, not as ragtag face-painted simpletons such as portrayed in Disney media fantasies, but in large numbers that bulked up the British regiments. In 1783 the first issue of the Georgia Gazette was published, the Revolutionary War informally ended in cease-fire, and the first Georgia headright laws were passed by the new state legislature. Land that had been acquired from a number of Cherokee and Creek tribes, whether in reparations, retribution, or just plain swindling, was put up for grabs in order to repopulate the state. It was chaotic times, however. In May 1784 when bounty warrants were first issued for Franklin and Washington counties, brawls broke out. Mismanagement of "ceded" territories culminated in the Yazoo land fraud fiasco in 1795, and in 1803 headright laws were scrapped and land lotteries were established. Georgia was the only state to distribute tracts of land on a lottery system. There were seven different land lotteries that continued through 1832. Modern historians paint the process as basic colonialism, but contemporary records indicate tremendous friction between cultures. The Georgia experience was not the New England Thanksgiving experience. Frequent Creek uprisings and butchery combined with the remembrance of Creek and Cherokee aid to the Tories created very strong anti-native, perhaps xenophobic, sentiments among the settlers of Georgia. Territory was systematically stripped of the natives and distributed in the land lotteries. The final, 1832, lottery led to the Trail of Tears.

This historical note helps to establish a sense of the chaos, conflict, and daily tension that existed throughout the early 1800s. Farming today is dangerous. Farming in 1810 on land that recently was used by a Creek tribe which has been scattered to the winds: there is no modern-day parallel. The Georgia militia was voluntary and consisted of coalitions of these same farmers.

Was Andrew Hawk a Revolutionary soldier? There is no evidence for it, other than the 1784 bounty warrant application. It is unknown whether he actually received land in Washington County (the courthouse burned in both 1855 and 1864, destroying almost all records), but there is no doubt he lived and farmed near Augusta in 1789. From there, the Hawk men left records in Wilkes County (1791-94), Oglethorpe County (1798), and Greene County (1801-15). They split at this time. William Hawk left records in Morgan County (1809-14), where he died and his descendants remained, and all the other Hawks went to Jasper County (1820-29). Jasper County became the launching pad to all points of Georgia south and west and on into Alabama as described elsewhere in this site.

Andrew Hawk's origin is unknown. Oral family traditions have long suggested a Native American ancestry. A German bible was at one time in the hands of the Newton family of Jasper County, which bible contained records for Seaborn Hawk's family. Census data on Jacob Hawk family indicates Maryland as an origin. Seaborn Hawk records that his aunt Peggy Harris was in Virginia, and Andrew Hawk's wife was from Pennsylvania or New Hampshire. While I have spot-checked records of Virginia and Maryland, I have not searched anywhere carefully or completely.

The Hawk Surname DNA Project was undertaken to answer the basic questions of origin and relatedness of the Hawk lines of Georgia and Alabama, and to find common ancestry with the Hawk lines of Pennsylvania.

THE PAPER RECORD

Descendants of William Hawk lived along Big Sandy Creek near the Walton and Morgan county line for many years. Many Hawk families still live in Walton County. Estate records for William indicate he died on or before June 1814. Tracing his descendancy was my initial goal. Bert Hawk was the torchbearer for this information, as well as much of the interrelated Malcom family information, and I will forever be indebted to him for that first major step forward – mapping the descendancy tree of William Hawk.

As my search broadened, I discovered the presence of several Hawk men and women in Jasper County beginning in 1820. Jasper County adjoins Morgan County, but is quite a ways from Big Sandy Creek and Walton County. Were these Hawk of Jasper County related to my Hawk of Walton and Morgan County? Investigation led me to believe they were. The keystone document – and still the only proof – is a page from Seaborn Hawk’s farm diary. “My father, Andrew Hawk, grand father the same name of Augusta, Ga, the first settling of Augusta. My uncles, Peter, Jacob and William. My aunts, Peggy Harris of Va. My mother, Ursula, her father William Watts from England, his father William [high?] church minister. My father’s mother was Christena Indelides [?] from Pennsylvania or New Hampshire. Mother’s statement just before she died in 1856.”

This remarkable document has served as my lighthouse and guiding post through years of research. It named the Jasper County men – Andrew, Peter, and Jacob – as well as my William Hawk – as well as the Andrew Hawk who is apparently the same man who applied for a Washington County bounty warrant in 1785 and placed an ad for a lost steer in the Augusta Chronicle in 1789.

My search for answers led me to trace the descendancies of each of these Jasper County Hawk lines. One line ended up in Elmore County, Alabama. Another in Coosa County, Alabama. Another in Heard County, Georgia. Another in Randolph and surrounding counties, in Georgia. But still I could not find proof that we came from the same gene pool. I posted all my results and speculations on my home page and on the Rootsweb family tree site, but my searching came to an end without conclusion. DNA genetics has made it possible now to resume the search with renewed vigor.