John & Prudence Mayberry

We have found two Mayberry families who lived in Mercer and Lawrence Counties in western Pennsylvania. A tradition in at least one of these families says that the two were not related. One of these families may trace back to Sylvanus Maybury who was born by 1709 or earlier. Sylvanus may or may not have been a son of Thomas Maybury, blacksmith, who settled in Bucks County, Pennsylvania in 1716.

The other family has been traced back only as far as John Mayberry who was probably born before 1760 in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. He died on 24 Nov 1812 in Neshannock Township, Mercer County, Pennsylvania. His wife was Prudence. We have not been successful in connecting this John Mayberry to other early Pennsylvania Mayberrys except for evidence that he apparently lived in Armagh Township in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania in 1785 before moving farther west to Mercer County.

Three descendants of John and Prudence Mayberry are participants in our DNA project. While their DNA samples match each other, they do not match the DNA signature of the English Mayburys which is found among most Pennsylvania Mayburys. This does not mean that John Mayberry, who died in Mercer County, was unrelated to the Pennsylvania Mayburys. Rather this family may have a different DNA signature which has been passed down from an early ancestor who was either adopted by a Mayberry family or born out-of-wedlock to a Mayberry mother. We continue to search for any trace of John and Prudence Mayberry and for a possible connection to earlier Mayburys in Pennsylvania.

Don Collins
August 2014