Regarding the Parentage of Abigail Pearsall

from History of Saratoga County, New York

Many genealogical researchers, including me, have struggled in vain to find the parents of Abigail Pearsall, the wife of Jeremiah Hart. However, I think I may have come closer to a solution using family trees and DNA.

We have a limited amount of information about Abigail, most of which comes from county histories, lineage books, and her tombstone. From the latter we know that she died on February 3, 1848 in her “77^th year”, which places her birth date at about 1748.

We do not know for sure where she and Jeremiah were married, or where she was born. Therefore, I decided to look at the Pearsall families in Dutchess county, New York, where Jeremiah lived after leaving Rhode Island, and the Pearsalls in Saratoga county, New York, where we know they lived as a married couple. I created separate trees on Ancestry for the Pearsalls of Dutchess county, and the Pearsalls I found in Saratoga county. In the process, I found that some of the same families had lived in both counties. After having my DNA tested through Ancestry, I identified people who matched with me who also had the name Pearsall in their lineages. I felt that this was a reasonable avenue of research since I was also matching with people on Ancestry whose more recent common ancestor with me was Jeremiah himself, as well as some of the three Richard Harts who preceded him. I therefore thought that it would follow that I might have some matches showing up who descended from Abigail's forebears.

I then created a “Pearsall DNA” tree based on the trees of my “Pearsall” matches. There were several, and they keep showing up to this day. Most of them show descent from the couple, Nathaniel Pearsall and Sarah Todd, some of whose children also resided in Saratoga County at the time Jeremiah and Abigail were living there. These are Sarah, (m. Samuel Sering), and George, both of whom resided in Greenfield, twenty miles away from the Hart homestead in Stillwater. There are books which name the children of Nathaniel and Sarah, but none of them mention Abigail. However, I have often seen such pedigrees which omit some of the children, very often female. Looking at the birth dates of the Pearsall children, Abigail could easily have been born between Hannah (b. 1743), and Mary (b. 1749). In any case, I have yet to find any document linking Abigail and her immediate family to her purported siblings, but I continue to look, particularly in newspapers.

I have decided to consider this DNA evidence as being strong, and have taken the liberty of assigning Nathaniel Pearsall and Sarah Todd to Abigail as her parents on my main tree on Ancestry, “A Hart Family Tree”. If you are one of Abigail and Jeremiah's descendants, and you also have a tree on Ancestry and DNA matches, I invite you to repeat my experiment. I would be very interested in hearing about your results.