Yesterday, I had this ingenious plan to locate the parents of Nathan Vess! Unfortunately, it isn’t the most easiest of ingenious plans.

I am a firm believer that the reason why Vess genealogy is so difficult, is because of a name change! The challenge now is figuring out what original surname our “Vess” name evolved from!

Here are my candidates based North and South Carolina census records 1790-1820.

VEST
WEST
BEST
VOSS

Name variants (as found on census records):
VIST
VERT
VASS
BASS
BOSS
BESS
WIST
BOST
VOST
WISS
VISS
VAST
BAST

My Monster SpreadSheet

I’ve decided to use a spreadsheet to track families with similar names in areas where I know some of Peter and Nathan’s neighbors and family have been.

So far, I am beginning to see distinct family migration patterns emerge…

As you can see, the WEST family is pretty widespread.

According to the WEST FAMILY DNA PROJECT, there are several different WEST lines with majority of them being connected to an orphan from England. There is also a West line connected to the Thomas West, Baron De La Warr and Benjamin West, an 18th century American artist.

UPDATE: According to several researchers who have done Y-chromosome research, it has been confirmed that there is no DNA relationship between Vess and West families. 🙂

Now, their DNA records do show that there is a West family connection with the South Carolina West family, but they do not know whose line they originate from. They also have a list of unrelated WEST families, with the assumption there was a name change at some point. Interestingly, while browsing the list, a few familiar names caught my eye.

Unfortunately, the WEST FAMILY DNA PROJECT website has been taken down or moved without a working link; so, I am unable to reference it again. However, I did manage to download a few pages of information the last time the website was active. 😉

Hopefully, with a little more investigation, I will be able to separate different WEST families.

Well, that is my project for the week!

Revisiting The VEST family

I did come across an interesting thing on the VEST family, but I don’t want to get side-tracked! I really need to work on the WEST family first. BUT, according to a BIO on FindMyGrave.com, for a VEST ancestor, it states their family is of “Scotch Irish origin.”

This is interesting for several reasons:
1) John Jay Vest is related to North Carolina Senator George Vest.
2) “Jay” is a surname that is related to both BEST and WEST families. And, middle names, especially, prior to the 1800’s, came from their mother or grandmother’s maiden name.
3) More importantly, this is the first time that I’ve seen anything stating the VEST family having Scot-Irish origins. Other family trees (a lot of them) have traced the VEST family to a Moses Vest (1600’s) from Germany.

This really needs further investigating…but first, the WEST family!