The Settlers of Avery's Rest

John and Sarah Avery began a tobacco farm beside Rehoboth Bay in 1674, when Delaware was still a raw edge of the English colonies. When the farm's burial ground was excavated, eleven graves came to light. These seven people are among the northwest European settlers buried there, and they include three generations of one maternal line, the family of the plantation itself across its first decades. Their genomes were studied with the consent of Avery descendants under Delaware's Unmarked Human Remains Law, a rare case of colonial dead sequenced with their own family's blessing. Their story cannot be separated from that of the Africans buried a few steps away, whose presence at the farm is the other half of the same history.

The genome-wide data behind this entry was published in Historical genomes elucidate European settlement and the African diaspora in Delaware.

Every Ancestry Map includes the free Notable Matches lens: your coordinates are compared to every sequenced member of every catalog entry, and the distance to the closest member is reported, a Euclidean distance in the same 25-dimensional space the Distance lens uses. Because these are a small group of real individuals, not a population average, distances naturally run larger than population distances. That is expected, not a poor result. And one thing is never claimed: a small distance means similar ancestry composition, not that the Settlers of Avery's Rest are your ancestor. See how it looks in the live demo or read about Ancestry Map, the full Global25 report.

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  Who were the Settlers of Avery's Rest?

  The Settlers of Avery's Rest (c. 1675-1725 CE, Avery's Rest, Sussex County, Delaware, USA) are one of the Historical figures entries in our Notable Matches catalog, represented by 7 sequenced ancient genomes published in the study "Historical genomes elucidate European settlement and the African diaspora in Delaware".

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  What does "matching" the Settlers of Avery's Rest mean?

  Your Global25 coordinates are compared to the entry's sequenced members and the distance to the closest one is reported, a Euclidean distance in the same 25-dimensional reference space the Distance lens uses. A notable entry is one person or one small burial group, not a population average, so distances naturally run larger than population distances.

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  Are they my ancestor?

  No, and no DNA test can show that. A small distance means your genome sits near theirs in a shared reference space: similar ancestry composition, not descent. Ancestrify never claims a notable individual is your ancestor or relative.

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  How do I see my own distance to the Settlers of Avery's Rest?

  Notable Matches is a free lens on every Ancestry Map, never sold separately. Order Ancestry Map, our Global25 analysis (29.99 EUR), and your report ranks your coordinates against the full catalog, with a portrait, dossier and map for every entry. The public demo shows the lens with example data.

The catalog holds every published entry across three tiers. Browse the full Notable Matches directory. Nearby entries:

• The First Africans of Avery's Restc. 1675-1725 CE

• The Kronan Sailor1 June 1676 CE

• The Kongo Kingdom at Kindokic. 1650-1800 CE

• George Bähr1666-1738 CE

• Jean-Paul Marat1743-1793 CE

• The Soldiers of the Reapers' War1652 CE

• The Kazakhs of Kuygenzhar18th century CE

• Ludwig van Beethoven1770-1827 CE

• Philip Calvert1626-1682 CE

• The Fallen of Le MansDecember 1793 CE

• Bishop Peder Winstrup1605-1679 CE

• The Grande Armée of VilniusDecember 1812 CE