DNA and the Hull-Adams Connection
By Leslie Murrow Morris
DNA has proven to be an invaluable tool for the genealogist. Back in the 1940s
when my uncle, Dick Hull, had a genealogist research the Hull ancestry, he
traced it back to the Reverend Joseph Hull, who landed in Cape Cod in 1634.
The line was not documented to the satisfaction of the Hull Family Association’s
genealogist, Phyllis Hughes, so I looked for DNA evidence of our relationship to
Joseph Hull’s documented descendants. Since the DNA donors had to be males
who bore the name Hull, I asked three cousins to participate. All three are
descendants of Hope Hull (1763-1818), our earliest well-known ancestor. Two,
Thomas Marion Hull and Gerry Glancy Hull, are descendants of Hope’s son
Henry; John Hart Marshall Hull is a descendant of Hope’s son Asbury. The DNA
of all three matched each other, but none matched Joseph Hull’s descendants.
This left me with a quandary. If Hope Hull’s father, Hopewell Hull, was not
descended from the reverend, whose son was he, and where did he come from?
Henry Hull’s son, Augustus Longstreet Hull, wrote in The Hulls of Georgia “The
early history of the family is wrapped in the obscurity which surrounds all frontier
life. In an age when railroads were unknown, and letters were rarely exchanged
even in the most populous communities, members of the same family drifted
apart and were lost to each other as completely as if dead. My father, who was
the source of my information, never knew any of his uncles and I do not recall if
he ever named them all.”
He went on, “HOPEWELL HULL, an Englishman by birth, came to Maryland in
1755, and settled in Somerset county. By occupation he was a ship builder. He
had five sons; of two of these nothing is known. The other three, HOPE,
THOMAS and JOHN were soldiers in the Revolutionary Army, and their names
are recorded as having received grants of land in Virginia in recognition of their
services.”
None of this information was documented, nor is it verifiable now by good, solid
documentation. And note that there is no mention of Hopewell Hull’s wife, Hope
Hull’s mother.
The mystery deepened when in 2007 I found that Richard Columbus Adams and
James Bruce Adams, distant cousins, each had DNA that matched perfectly the
DNA of my Hull cousins. Their Adams ancestors had lived in the Eastern Shore
of Maryland at the same time as Hopewell Hull did.
My cousin Elizabeth Cannon, a geneticist by education who has also been
digging through as many Maryland records as she could find, solved the mystery
of the Hull-Adams relationship when she found court documents from 1730 in the
Maryland State Archives.