By: David Vance
Finding connections from medieval records and heraldry with DNA pointing the way.
If somewhere in the universe, there was a library devoted solely to collecting life’s mysteries, in that library, on a shelf in a quiet corner, there might be a small book titled “The Case of the Clergyman’s Arms.” It is not a huge mystery in the annals of history, but it is still one which lasted for 363 years.
If you ventured into that quiet corner and brushed the dust off that book for a quick read, the opening pages would lay out an intriguing mystery from the 17th century. Written as the case notes of an investigation, you might first read the backstory of its central Scottish figure:
1605. Subject John Vans/Vaus graduates with a Bachelor of Arts from St. John’s College in Cambridge. He later received a Master of Arts (college not officially recorded, but a Johannes Vaus received a Master of Arts from Edinburgh University in 1611).
1613. Subject John Vans, now ordained as Rev. John Vans, is assigned from the Church of Scotland into the Church of Ireland as rector of Kilmacrenan in Donegal county, Ireland (and additionally of nearby Movagh in 1615). Additional notes would make clear that assigning Scottish rectors was common practice to minister to the new Protestant population during the Plantation of Ulster. In 1622, the Church of Ireland recorded that the Rev. Vans was “a learned Scholar and eloquent preacher, grave and honest in conversation.”
Apart from a brief period in the Cromwellian years in Ireland (early 1650s), where he left his post for a short time, the Rev. John Vans continued to appear in the few records available from the 17th century in that part of Ireland. He had at least one son and several grandsons, and his descendants eventually dispersed to other parts of northern Ireland.
A later entry in the book for our astonishingly well-recorded Renaissance figure would document his passing and would also first set out the mystery:
1661. Subject John Vans’ detailed will is recorded. Unusually, the will is sealed with a coat of arms in red wax.
Why “unusually”? At that period in history, the only clergy allowed ecclesiastical coats of arms were bishops and higher ecclesiastical figures. Centuries before that, coats of arms had been extended for use by landed gentry, but they were still reserved for one individual and (under certain rules) their heirs, and by displaying a coat of arms, the Rev. John Vans was staking a claim to a hereditary right not usually afforded to humble rectors. So, the case notes in our book would continue:
Mystery: Who is John Vans? Why would he feel entitled to display a coat of arms as a rector of a small Irish parish? His education clearly marks him to be from a family of at least some means, but his origins in Scotland are not recorded, and the seal on his will appears to be a deliberate attempt to claim a previously unrecognized relationship to an armigerous (coat of arms-bearing) family.
So what was the coat of arms? For that, we have to wait for more time to pass until we reach these entries in the book:
1810. Sir William Betham, the Ulster King at Arms, compiles a summary of the prerogative wills collected in Dublin. Noting the unusual coat of arms seal on the Rev. John Vans’ will, he sketches the arms in his summary (sketch follows).
1860. William Balbirnie, a great-great-grandson of the Rev. John Vans, documents his mother’s, Vance, ancestry (by then “Vance” being the updated spelling of the name) back to the clergyman in a book he self-publishes about Irish Vances. Like many genealogists of his time, Balbirnie makes copious detailed observations about the records and people from his time period and then indulges in flights of wild fancy about how they are likely to be related. As part of his investigation, Balbirnie handles the Rev. John Vans’ will and records the arms in his book as “on a bend, three mollets” (sketch of this blazon follows).
A later entry in our imagined book would note that the will and its seal were eventually destroyed in the 1922 Four Courts fire, but at least we have these two independent reports of the seal.
The case would further draw the investigators into the arcane world of heraldry. The two independent reports of the coat of arms are not identical, illustrating the difficulty of relying even on eyewitness accounts. Betham, in 1810, added charges (objects) to the field called cinquefoils (five-pointed flowers, also known as fraises in Scottish heraldry), which Balbirnie did not note. Were these imperfections in the wax seal or actual charges? We’ll never know. But in the 17th century, mobile charges like cinquefoils were often used temporarily in a generation for individual differentiation or cadency (which had not yet been formalized). The charges on the ordinary (i.e., the stars) would have been more important.
William Balbirnie traced the coat of arms to an existing family of landed gentry called the Vans of Barnbarroch, a small holding in southern Galloway in southwestern Scotland. But then he had a problem because the Vans of Barnbarroch didn’t have exactly the same coat of arms; theirs was the same except with one star instead of three:
In his 1860 book, Balbirnie confronts both the original mystery of why the clergyman had a coat of arms in the first place and his new mystery of the one star versus three by inventing an elder undocumented first son and heir of the Vans of Barnbarroch title who through some scandal was forced to flee to Ireland in disgraced exile and decided to adopt a modified version of his former coat of arms (Balbirnie later presented a copy of his book to the then-Laird of Barnbarroch and was soundly ridiculed in a series of letters for this untenable theory).
Balbirnie’s book also includes extensive documentation of Vaus/Vans/Vance families in 1860 in Ireland, and (sometimes with great difficulty) he ties them all back to his own ancestry as common lines descending from the Rev. John Vans of Kilmacrenan.
If our book were to progress into modern times, it would show that as the only published theory of the Rev. John Vans’ origins, Balbirnie’s book and his theory of descent from the Vans of Barnbarroch becomes unquestioned. By the time the Vance Family Association forms in 1984, this origin story and the assumption that all Irish Vances descend from the Vans of Barnbarroch have taken on the status of a tribal creation myth among genealogists researching Irish Vances.
Cracks in that myth, however, start to emerge from Y-DNA testing.
2005-2024. Y-DNA testing of Irish Vance descendants in Ireland, the UK, North America, and Australia reveals that Vances today of Scottish and Irish origin carry seven different Y-DNA lines. Two of those relate to the Vans of Barnbarroch: the 23rd Laird of Barnbarroch’s haplogroup is identified as R-FGC32083, and the most numerous subgroup of Vances of Irish origin is identified as R-FT140295, two haplogroups who are estimated to connect to each other around 1400 A.D. While the 99% confidence interval does stretch to 1647 A.D., this overall seems to indicate a much older connection between the Vans of Barnbarroch and the Rev. John Vans. If R-FT140295 represents the descendants of the Rev. John Vans, as seems likely, why is their relationship to the Vans of Barnbarroch most likely over 200 years before him?
In the meantime, further investigation into the history of the Vans of Barnbarroch shed new light on their origins. Believed to be a junior line of the former Vaux of Dirleton baronial line, the Vans of Barnbarroch first arose in 1382. They claimed this junior relationship by adopting the Dirleton arms with the addition of the first star, though neither genealogical nor DNA evidence exists today to prove this earlier link. But records do exist for two related lines of Scottish landed gentry that branched off in the early 1400s—the Vaus/Vass of Lochslin near Inverness and the Vaus of Menie near Aberdeen.
While the Vans of Barnbarroch family has survived to present day, their related lines were not so lucky. The Vass of Lochslin in the Highlands were affiliated with Clans Munro and Ross and flourished for 200 years, but in 1603, they were declared outlaws, and the family branch disappeared except for some burgesses in Inverness. While a record of their family coat of arms has not survived, the Rev. John Vans was already on a path to ordination by 1603, so it would be most unusual for him to make a claim later to their hereditary coat of arms and even more so to claim kinship to an outlawed family.
The Vaus of Menie were around for even less time. Recorded as a separate family starting in 1435, they eventually became embroiled in the highly politicized 16th-century factions of Aberdeen, which even drew in King James V and led to his burning of Janet Douglas, Lady Glamis, at the stake in 1537. A month earlier, John Vaus of Menie had received a suspended sentence for his part in “the slaughter of John Lion, and the mutilation of Alexander Rutherford… and for common oppression done by him…upon our sovereign liege lord [i.e., treason against the crown].” Eventually, John Vaus was pardoned for “all actions… treason only being excepted.” As a traitor to the crown, John Vaus was eventually forced in 1556 to deed all of his estates plus the title of Menie to his son-in-law, John Carnegie, and while the Vaus name continued in Aberdeen, the titled Vaus of Menie were no more.
Returning to our imagined book, we might find the following on the next page:
2020s. The investigation focuses on the Vaus of Menie. Given that no actual evidence supports the Rev. John Vans’ descent from the Vans of Barnbarroch and there is DNA evidence of a connection to an earlier Vaus/Vans line, could the Rev’s descent from the Vaus of Menie be possible? Rev. John Vans would be a grandson or great-grandson of the John Vaus accused of treason, and with James V and the other players from that period long dead, there would be no reason the current heir of a lost title could not still feel entitled to his hereditary arms only a few generations later.
Several ancient armorials document that the Vaus of Menie did, in fact, have a coat of arms with a diagonal stripe and three stars (one version even says with cinquefoils on the field, which again may have been just individual differences in a given generation). While these references support the new theory, there is not enough indirect evidence to prove conclusively that the Vaus of Menie used the three-star arms. For that, we need direct primary evidence, which can only come from something left to us by one of the Vaus of Menie themselves that tells us what coat of arms they used.
The next entry in the book would record that lightning finally strikes:
2024. A charter from 1554 A.D. documenting the grant by John Vaus of Menie of a half a net’s worth of fishing rights on the River Dee comes to light among the few historical documents held at the National Register House in Edinburgh regarding the Vaus of Menie. The charter retains the seal of the grantor and provides what may be the sole surviving primary evidence of the coat of arms of the Vaus of Menie (picture follows).
At last, a witness from 1554 linked the Vaus of Menie directly to the Rev. John Vans of Kilmacrenan. We have our answer—he was documenting in his will his descent from the “attainted” Menie line, not the Vans of Barnbarroch. It only took us 363 years to understand and DNA evidence to kick the investigation in the right direction.
As we turn to the last page of our imagined book before closing the cover and replacing it on its dusty shelf, we might catch a final entry that reads:
Mark PENDING CASE CLOSED (pending full genealogical proof writeup) on the family origins of the Rev. John Vans of Kilmacrenan and his use of a hereditary coat of arms. Genealogical proof will rely mainly on the primary evidence of the Vaus of Menie seal and its connection to the two independent secondary evidence reports of the seal on the Rev. John Vans’ will. Additional supporting indirect evidence is provided by many sources including DNA, and no contradictory evidence remains. DNA evidence, in this case, was not conclusive on its own, but without it suggesting a focus on the Vaus of Menie, the primary evidence of their coat of arms might never have surfaced, or its importance never been recognized.
About the Author
David Vance
Author, Editor, Group Project Administrator
Dave Vance has been a computer services executive for more years than he can remember, and it was through IBM’s partnership with the National Genographic Project in 2005 that he submitted his first test kit and became interested in the growing field of genetic genealogy. Since then he has tested with multiple companies and become an experienced project administrator and co-administrator. He has also been an avid genealogist for over 30 years since his father passed on the hobby. He is the DNA Advisor for the Vance Family Association (a surname-focused genealogy association) and is currently also serving a term as the association’s president.
In 2016, Dave wrote the SAPP tool for Y-DNA group analysis and in 2020 he published “The Genealogist’s Guide to Y-DNA Testing for Genetic Genealogy.” In 2021 he became the editor for the ISOGG’s Journal of Genetic Genealogy, a regular academic journal publishing articles of interest to genetic genealogists. Dave has also lectured on Y-DNA, mtDNA and autosomal DNA testing and their use for genealogical research and has produced several introductory video series. In his spare time, Dave can also be found in the various social media groups focused on genetic genealogy.