Causey Surname One-Name Study

18 June 2022

CAUSEY SURNAME – ONE-NAME STUDY

What’s in a name? We humans name everything. We see a bright light in the sky and call it the Sun. We begin learning names as soon as we can hear sounds. My dear wife and I began talking to our babies even before they were born. We gave them names. They learned their names. (Not before they were born I don’t think) Those sounds we make give sense to our world. Even my dog Benjamin knows his name. He likes his name; I know because he expresses his joy with his tail. Some names are closely associated with our sense of identity; of who we are in the grand scheme. I am an American of Scot-Irish and English descent. I’m not just a human who lives on a satellite of the sun called Earth, I have a definite Identity which makes me somehow feel I’m not just dust in the wind, I’m me, “cogito, ergo sum” I think therefore I am. So, when someone asks, “Who are you, where are you from?” we usually respond with our first name, surname, and some geographical location, “I’m Ray Causey, originally from Alabama.” I propose that for most of us our Surname provides a sort of foundation for our sense of self. Early in life I began to ask questions about my family. Stories of past family heroes and scoundrels were told. I would hang around the porch in the evenings where family had gathered hoping for a cool breeze talking about all things past, present, and future. Conversations often involved family, the Beasley side, the Causey side, the Mozingo side. Who had Indian blood, who was a bastard child, who ran off and married one of those Tucker boys? These ideas of identity and family began take form in my head and gave me a deep sense of belonging, of identity. My sense of identity, of belonging, has come to be founded to a large degree on my association with that surname, CAUSEY. Now in my senior years, I’ve come to a point in my quest for identity of realizing I’m just one of a huge family of Causeys all over the world. I want to know who my cousins, aunts, and uncles are, all the way back to the 5^th, 6^th, even 7^th generation or more. I want to expand the Causey family tree to include the family lineages of all the Causeys in the world…whew!

Much of my identity as a member of the Causey family was based on my interpretation of what I had heard and seen. Some of those interpretation and beliefs were based on facts. But, much of what I had learned about my roots lay in family Lore. I’m now in search of facts. Facts which include verifiable documentation and DNA. Here is where I’m going with this blog.

Are you in the Causey male line or someone who is interested in tracing our Causey line? Have you taken a DNA test, especially a Y-DNA, or another DNA test like 23&Me.com? Have you read my introduction on One-Name.org . What we want to do is discover and document our individual Causey family male fathers as far back as we can find them in every branch. This needs to be a global group effort. We need Causey Cousins from Ireland, Scotland, Australia, England, Canada, and anywhere else to be participants. We will look at each well documented family tree and try to find the primogenitor with whom several individual pedigrees merge with that one x-great-grandfather. If we can get two or three different family trees from distant cousins (like 3rd or 4th cousins) and then go back 5 or 6 generations, we might find they all come to a match with, for example, 5th Great Grandfather Thomas Causey b. 1700 and died 1776 in Maryland. Next, in order to verify that there have been no biological breaks in the family line we look at DNA. For another example, a male several generations back in the line may have had his parents die when he was very young and was raised by a Causey family from the local Church. He may never have known he was adopted but it changes the Paternal DNA line from him on down to today’s male Causeys in that line. What happened in this situation is that a new DNA Causey family line began when that young boy was adopted into the Causey surname. To his adoptive parents he is just as much a Causey as they. Another more frequent reason we might end up with different Y-DNA is if the first CAUSEY male got his name because he lived close to a causey, a raised path or road crossing a marsh or water. Other Causey lines will discover their Causey surname is a derivation of a named geographical place or region. For example, some branches of today’s Causey lines can trace that lineage back to the De Coursey family “Irish (of Norman origin): habitational name from any of various places in northern France called Courcy, from the Romano-Gallic personal name Curtius.”[1]

So we very likely will end up with five or six different DNA lines of the Causey family. What we will do is color code each Y-DNA line (See the Table below) and continue in search of those original Causey kinsmen who received that surname (or its derivative) and passed it down to us. Make sense? That’s why we do a Y-DNA test to determine who belongs to which color line. Below begins the research. I’m sure we will modify these simple beginnings. But for now, take a look at how our one-name study

TABLE – 1 DNA LINES

The table above is an initial stab at displaying the different Causey surname lines. So far all lines are T-M70 haplogroup. I expect we may have variations once all DNA testing.

Each participant in the Causey surname “One-Name Project” will be associated with their matching tree in WikiTree. For participants who do not already have a tree in WikiTree, I have or will open a tree for them including only their Paternal Line.