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Documenting my ancestors and helping others with their research.
Costilow Autosomal DNA Results
Autosomal DNA testing through companies such as Ancestry.com, FamilyTreeDNA and 23andMe, combined with GEDmatch, allows us to conduct deeper research than the paper trail provides.
The descendants of James Andrew J. Costilow and his first wife Martha Ann Miller match heavily with one another. I've found at least 40 of us descendants who've tested so far and this endless data collectively helps pull our family tree together. We Costilow-Miller descendants naturally match fairly highly with one another. That being said, we do match with A LOT of Costiloe, Costilow, Costlow, Costelow, etc. descendants from other various families that can be clustered together. Spending a significant amount of time sifting through our cousins' DNA kits has resulted in almost a dozen family groups.
Below are the details of these family groups, in order how much cM (centimorgans) are collectively shared amongst the Costilow-Miller descendants.
Family Group: Connection:
Hardiman "Hardy" Costilow & wife Edna Lewis (son of Edward Costilow & 2nd wife Mary Waldrop)
12 DNA matches, ranging from 57 cM to 9 cM.
John Hiram Costiloe & wife Susan Emily Wragg (son of Edward Costilow & 1st unknown wife)
4 DNA matches, ranging from 45 cM to 8 cM.
James Costilow & wife Jane Reed (son of Christopher Costilow)
19 DNA matches, ranging from 39 cM to 8 cM.
James Costilow & wife Mary Bethia Hopkins (son of Edward Costilow & 1st unknown wife)
9 DNA matches, ranging from 38 cM to 11 cM.
Bethesda Coslow & husband John Lipscomb (presumed daughter of James Costilow & wife Jane Reed)
2 DNA matches, both at 32 cM.
Joseph Costilow & wife Nancy Hurley (son of Edward Costilow & 1st unknown wife)
8 DNA matches, ranging from 31 cM to 11 cM.
John Costilow & his wife Susan [Braun?] (son of Christopher Costilow)
14 DNA matches, ranging from 29 cM to 9 cM.
Robert Costello & wife Mary [indigenous?] (son of Christopher Costilow)
12 DNA matches, ranging from 27 cM to 8 cM.
Elijah Costilow & wife Henrietta Walker (son of Edward Costilow & 2nd wife Mary Waldrop)
5 DNA matches, ranging from 21 cM to 9 cM.
Margaret Costilow & husband Jonathan Adams (presumed daughter of Christopher Costilow)
5 DNA matches, ranging from 17 cM to 8 cM.
Irish Ancestry
Two DNA matches for my mother, René Rodgers on MyHeritage, align heavily with known Costilow DNA; they are brothers surnamed Bergin and they reside in Ireland. Their paternal grandmother was Ellen Costello, born 1877 in Tullamore, County Kings, Ireland, to William Costello and Maria Flynn.
Chromosome 1 shows the Bergin brothers are a triangulated match with my mother and three (3) known Costilow cousins; all three descending from Robert Costeloe.
Chromosome 9 shows
Chromosome 1 - René Rodgers' DNA Painter
There's another DNA match for my mother on MyHeritage that also aligns with known Costilow DNA; they are surnamed Timmins and they reside in Ireland. Their maternal great-grandmother was Margaret Mary Costello, daughter of Richard Costello and Elizabeth Kennedy; residents of Dublin, Ireland.
Chromosome 9 shows Timmins is a triangulated match with my mother and one (1) known Costilow cousin; a descendant of James Andrew J. Costilow.
Chromosome 17 shows Timmins is a triangulated match with my mother and two (2) known Costilow cousins; both descendants of James Andrew J. Costilow.
Chromosome 9 - René Rodgers' DNA Painter
Chromosome 17 - René Rodgers' DNA Painter
African & Indigenous Ancestry
I will preface this section with the fact that family stories from nearly every Costilow branch of the Costilow-Miller generation have varying claims of Indigenous American ancestry. I vividly remember my mother's first cousin, the now late Roger Waters, and our first conversation when I began genealogy research. He and my mom had called one another and caught up over the years, eventually handing off the phone to myself. Roger told me how my great-grandmother, Ellen Inez Martin or "Big Mama," would become very dark during the summers and to not be surprised if I found non-European ancestors. I must also clarifying that it's relatively common for American families of colonial stock to claim indigenous ancestry. I could only do so much with this information 25+ years ago, however, DNA has significantly changed that.
My DNA
AncestryDNA shows I personally have 0.56% "Mongolia & Centra Asia-North" and according to their data this is from my mother, someone of nothing but German and Colonial American heritage. I strongly feel this is being misread for Indigenous American, which GEDmatch appears to substantiate.
Running the Eurogenes K13 test with the Admixture tool shows:
I personally have 1.19% Amerindian ancestry.
My late mother, René Rodgers, shows 1.73% Amerindian and also 0.75% Northeast African.
My late aunt Jean Rodgers Heffner, my grandfather's sister, shows slightly different results: 0.98% Northeast African and 0.57% Sub-Saharan.
These results can be seen in the pie charts immediately below. My results suggest an Amerindian ancestor at least 5-7 generations back. The 7th generation for my line of descent would be Edward Costilow and his first unknown wife.
Nick Gombash - GEDmatch kit CW4643635
René Rodgers - GEDmatch kit LV4903407
Jean Rodgers Heffner - GEDmatch kit SN6005039
My Mother's DNA
Viewing my mother's Eurogenes K13 test with the Admixture tool via GEDmatch, this time with "Chromosome Painting," allows us to see specific spikes in heritage at the segment level on each chromosome. Using the segment data I had previously compiled in DNAPainter, I began to review specific segments associated with the Costilow family. For my mother specifically, chromosome 15 appears to hold a significant amount of DNA from the Costilow family; stretching from segment 38 million to 102 million, sourced from four different Costilow DNA matches: Don Black, Doyle Church, Shannon Tindall and Lucy Costilow Jacobson. The color guide to the right helps interpret the bar graph below.
Indigenous American:
Two large Amerindian spikes appear ~36 million & ~37.5 million, the latter shared with Don Black
One moderate Amerindian spike appears ~63 million and is shared with Shannon Tindall.
Another moderate Amerindian spike appears ~70-71 million, which is again shared with Shannon Tindall.
African:
Two moderate Northeast African spikes appears ~46-48 million and ~55-56 million, shared with Don Black and Doyle Church.
One large Sub-Saharan spike appears ~51 million, again shared with Don Black and Doyle Church.
Knowing one test is not enough, I decided to use another GEDMatch test, called Deocade World9, on my mother's DNA. The results came back with 1.27% Amerindian.
Aligning the data presented from the "Chromosome Painting" results shows shared Amerindian fragments of DNA with a cousin named Mitzie Tanner, a descendant of Joseph Costilow and his wife Nancy Hurley. They collectively share 71.5cM of DNA across 3 segments. GEDmatch states they share 9.9cM of DNA on segments 8,231,701 - 13,052,677 of Chromosome 12 (images immediately below.)
You can see from my mother's results that she has trace fragments of Amerindian and East Asian, while cousin Mitzie Tanner has trace fragments and a rather large spike of Amerindian. This is DNA they mutually share from Edward Costilow and his first unknown wife. Mitzie Tanner will be mentioned again further below.
René Rodgers - GEDmatch kit LV4903407
Deocad World9; Chromosome 12
Mitzie Tanner - GEDmatch kit A166419
Deocad World9; Chromosome 12
About East Asian DNA:
Evidence of East Asian populations contributing up to 75% of Indigenous Americans ancestry can be reviewed within the study The deep population history of northern East Asia from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene, linked here. The study further identifies the Tianyuan individual (from approximately 40,000 years ago) having belonged to an early East Asian lineage, whose descendants ultimately fed into both the northern Han and Indigenous American gene pools.
Another study, Paleolithic to Bronze Age Siberians Reveal Connections with First Americans and across Eurasia, linked here, explains that genome-wide data from Upper-Palaeolithic Kolyma (≈ 9.8 kya) and Yana (≈ 14 kya) show a 50:50 mix of Ancient North Eurasian and North-East Asian components; exactly the dual ancestry carried by ancestral Native Americans before they entered Alaska. The paper explicitly calls these groups “sister lineages to ancestral Native Americans”, providing the smoking-gun evidence that the East-Asian portion of Native American DNA was already in Siberia >20 kya.
NOTE: This is why I believe "Mongolia & Centra Asia-North" is showing up on my AncestryDNA test; indigenous American populations are under-represented when it comes to DNA research.
Continuing to run my mother's DNA through the GEDmatch tool MDLP K16 Modern shows mutually shared trace fragments of 'Amerindian' (red) between cousin Don Black, specifically on chromosome 5 through segments 106,822,232 - 113,651,047.
René Rodgers - GEDmatch kit LV4903407
Don Black - GEDmatch kit A908891
My mother's results collectively estimate an Indigenous American ancestor about 5-7 generations back, about the 1730s-1780s.
Grand-Aunt Jean Rodgers Heffner's DNA
My grandfather's late sister, Jean Rodgers Heffner, took an autosomal DNA test for me through 23andMe in 2015. 23andMe states Jean has 0.5% African DNA, specifically Ghanaian, Liberian & Sierra Leonean. They further state this ancestor was likely around 6+ generations ago and lived sometime around or prior to ~1750.
23andMe provides an "Ancestry Composition Chromosome Painting," which estimates the ancestral origins of segments of your DNA by comparing them to reference populations. They are showing three segments of DNA aligning with West African ancestry, specifically on Chromosomes 12, 16 and 19 (red blocks, in the image to the right). We can download these segments of data from 23andMe and input them into an application such as DNA Painter.
GEDMatch allows for deeper research into these African DNA segments, finding triangulated matches with known cousins:
Chromosome 12 is shared with the late Mitzi Tanner. Mitzie is a descendant of Joseph Costilow and Nancy Hurley.
Chromosome 19 is shared with Ken W. Costilow and Rob McClellan - both are descendants of James A. J. Costilow and Martha Ann Miller.
Conclusions & Other Notes
Most of the children, or grandchildren, of John Hiram Costiloe collectively applied for enrollment to the Mississippi Choctaw tribe in 1901. Their testimony ultimately states that John Hiram Costiloe was either 1/2 or 1/4 Choctaw. The testimonies question why John Hiram Costiloe didn't remove to the Indian Territory (Oklahoma), amongst other things, which the children simply couldn't answer - their father had died during the Civil War almost 40 years prior, while they were children. Their applications and testimonies were rejected due to a lack of evidence. For what it's worth, after reading the testimonies, it's my belief that they were applying under the wrong tribe, considering their father was from Tennessee and not Mississippi. John Hiram Costiloe couldn't have migrated with the Mississippi Choctaw when he was likely still in Tennessee at the time.
All of this information combined with the fact that Edward Costilow's brother, Robert Costilow (d. bef. July 1812, Culpeper Co, VA), was also supposedly married to an indigenous woman, point towards the Costilow family possibly having mixed-race origins. There were a large amount of Custaloe-Custillo free people of colour appearing in Virginia records, beginning around the 1760s-1770s.
This all being said, we must analyze and investigate the claims of a familial connection to the Custalow family of the Mattaponi tribe in Virginia. In doing so, we must look at the history of the Mattaponi tribe itself. The publication Mattaponi Indian Reservation King William County, Virginia: Heritage Properties of Indian Town: The Mattaponi Indian Baptist Church, School, and Homes of Chiefly Lineages explains the history of the Mattaponi extremely well and also discusses the Custalow family several times, specifically Agnes Custelow and her descendants; I highly suggest reading this informative publication.
Cousin and fellow genealogist, Don Rutherford wrote his history of the "Costiloes" in 2003. Within this narrative he states the following:
"Christopher Costellow (Costaloe, Costellow, Costeloe, Costulo, Costiloe, Cosshtoon, etc.,), born in Ireland in the early 1700's. Christopher came to America in the middle 1700's through England as a domestic servant to work an Englishmen farm for a period of time, which paid for his passage to America. When Christopher time was served, the land owner would not grant him his freedom, as was agreed upon. Christopher ran away, ending up in King William County, Virginia, where the Mattaponi Indians took him into their reservation, as a friend. Christopher took an Indian maiden Mary Major (Maja), as his wife.
Notes for Christopher Costaloe:
(Taken from the Footsteps Newsletter by Jesse Costello, dated 1991. Provided by Polly Dennison)
The first recording of property being owned was in Loudoun County, Virginia, by Christopher Costoloe (our forefather) in 1788. He was also the grantor of property to two of his sons, Robert and John. According to a lot of the family in Virginia Christopher had a total of thirty children, fifteen by an Irish woman and fifteen by a native American Indian. These children as they got to adulthood spread throughout the southern states, Kentucky, North and south Carolina, Tennessee, and even Maryland."
Notes for Robert
NOTE: All of this information from Don Rutherford needs to be sourced and proven, or disproven. I have found no record of any land ownership in Loudoun County, Virginia.
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