I've been meaning to write this for a long time. As many of you know Jinx Hartung had a theory that the father of our ancestor Johannes Abel was Paul Abel from New Jersey. She based this on the fact that there is a Paul Abel buried in Frederick, Maryland and he is the right age to be the father of Johannes. There is also a missing Paul Abel from the New Jersey family who seems to line up with the Paul Abel that showed up in Frederick.
We don't have much more than that. But something that is very curious to me and I wanted to draw your attention to is the fact that many of the New Jersey Abel descendants started using the spelling "Auble" at the same time our family started using the spelling "Auvil." One way to eventually solve the mystery of whether we are related to the New Jersey Abel family would be to compare DNA. If all the Auvils and Aubles and Abels match up we can conclude that we are related.
How can you help? If you are a male with the surname Auvil you can have your DNA tested at Ancestry.com for less than 100$. If you do please let us know the results! (Female Auvils will not show the yDNA of our male ancestors.)
If you would like to delve further into this mystery you may want to read the blog Genea Musings by Randy Seaver. Randy Seaver is an Auble descendant and he traces his Auble line back to the New Jersey Abels. Genea-Musings is one of the most popular genealogy blogs today. I looked at his latest trees and he is now listing the New Jersey Paul Abel as the same Paul Abel that is buried in Frederick, Maryland. He doesn't list any references for that so I think he may be going on the theory of Jinx Hartung for that. We'll see if we can find out more from him.
More about Jinx Hartung: Jinx is an Auvil descendant and publisher of the Auvil Lines newsletter.
More about the New Jersey Abel family: when we talk about the New Jersey family we mean Andreas Abel (abt 1690 - 1751) of Fox Hill.
Update: we now have a male Auvil family member who has shared his test. He is in the G Haplogroup and he matches a man named Cain Abel (1766-Jul. 3, 1850) who lived in Tennessee. If you would like to follow these developments you should join the Auvil Family Facebook group. (This group is now closed) And you can submit your own DNA rsults to the Abel Surname DNA Project. (this seems to be closed now too 2021) This project covers the surnames Abel, Auvil, Abell, Auville and others. It is designed to sort out the surnames by Haplogroup. If Abels and Auvils are in the same Haplogroup with matching numbers it means we have the same male ancestor and we therefore have the same surname even though it may have been spelled differently by different families.
Catherine dee Auvil Sept. 2013
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