Joao Moises Dionis Benabides (J2b2a1 CTS6190) - Name changes & conflicting records

https://books.google.com/books?id=nFVLAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA148 -- more support for the Aberdeenshire connection of the Montserrat Harlaws. Original marriage notice at https://books.google.com/books?id=9tw5AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA410

So I'm thinking this is just a mistake, with two different men/families getting jumbled on one profile.

Regarding the first document link, I found the source: it's from David Dobson's "Scottish-American Heirs, 1683-1883" (1990).

More confusion: the 1816 ship manifest is for a 43-year-old John Dionis, but this profile says Joao Moises Dionis Benabides was born 1789.

The original 21-page NARA file also doesn't seem to say anything about Montserrat, but the handwriting is admittedly difficult to make out.

Bottom line is, none of these documents support the profile. Jaim, can you check to see if maybe you still have the documents you intended to upload?

Sorry, I didn't link the original NARA manifest: https://www.ancestry.com/interactive/1174/USM1371_1-0009

The page we want is #18, which is already saved to the profile at https://www.geni.com/documents/view?doc_id=6000000014558262001&

I know I'm talking to myself here, but I'm trying to sort this out in a transparent way.

We have at least three different men confused here:

1) John Harlaw of Montserrat, the son of Alexander Harlaw of Aberdeenshire. Probably the same John Harlaw of Montserrat who returned to Scotland and married a Mrs. Annand of Haddo in 1795.

2) John Dionis, origins unknown, b. c. 1773. He travelled to the U.S. or a U.S. territory in 1816. He does not appear in any of the indexed West Indian records I've gone through, or in the unindexed Leewards collections I've gone through, so he was probably a transient sailor.

3) John M. Harlow, b. c. 1799, who drowned in June 1835 in an accident at a mill near Richmondale, Ross County, Ohio. (See https://www.ancestry.com/mediaui-viewer/tree/8229014/person/2555159... and https://www.ancestry.com/mediaui-viewer/tree/8229014/person/2555159... for description.)

Ashley,

You’re onto something.

1. The following source claims Joao Moises’ children acquired the name Harlow after being adopted by a neighbor. How does this square with Joao Moises’ brother being named Ricardo Harlaw?

https://peoplepill.com/people/joao-moises-benabides-dinis/

2. The person managing this tree is a member of an FTDNA group of mostly Ashkenazi Jews claiming descent from a medieval Portuguese rabbi, as supposedly evidenced by the last name Charlap, or variants thereof. What are the odds that Joao Moises Dionis Benabides was a descendant of this rabbi, who happened to have acquired the English name Harlow parallel to Ashkenazi descendants acquiring the similar name Charlap?

I think something is going on here. And why does this descendant’s Y chromosome share a common patrilineal ancestor within the last 225 years, according to YFull, with someone descended from the English Virginian Gideon Bowles? And why are both kits labeled Portuguese?

Hi, Joshua. Thanks for replying!

I can't really speak to any of the DNA questions. But regarding the first point, that info comes from an old Wikipedia page that was deleted for being unverifiable/unproven original research. So it looks like their editors ran into the same confusion we have.

I've tried going through all the different sources I can think of -- academic writings in JSTOR, published histories of Sephardim, unindexed Leewards records, Virginia and Ohio newspapers, etc. -- and I can't come up with anything that would even start to support this person's existence. (As a side note, I also can't find anything about the Ohio John Harlow dying in an attack by Native Americans; everything I find says he drowned in a workplace accident.)

I see that Randy Schoenberg has disconnected this profile and marked it as fictional, which unfortunately I believe to be the right decision.

I agree with you, and am impressed by Randy's swift recognition of the issue. Unfortunately, the creator of the profile has put a lot of work out there (specifically in connection to Sephardic Jewish history), and this casts doubt on all of it.

And the creator of this profile is probably the one who created that Wikipedia page in the first page—he's a prolific Wikipedia contributor.