Ireana Ryder (née Cushman) (1769-09-12 – 1849-11-06), with name variants, see below, is the mother of Nathan Ryder Jr. and thus possibly my 4th-great-grandmother, depending on the Ryder paternity. Her husband, the Deacon Nathan Ryder Sr. (1773-08-23 – 1848-06-07), supposedly the father of her children, was almost surely not my ancestor, as indicated by DNA and other evidence. Ireana was born in Stafford, Connecticut and died in Bristol, Vermont.

Name

Her name may have initially been Irene Anna. It is variously listed as Irene, Anna, Irena, or Ireana, the last two apparently a melding of names. Conventionally I use Ireana.

Family

Ireana was the daughter of William Cushman (1738-06-24 – 1818-10-31) and Abi Parker. Her mother Abi’s origins are unclear. The Isaac Allerton Mayflower book says Abi was born 1748-07-12 and died after 1820-05-05^ref, but the text does not indicate where this information comes from, and that would make her 14 when she married William on 1763-07-05, which is rather young. The Daughters of the American Revolution, possibly the source for this birth, also gives Abi a death date of 1828-10-04 (so dying aged 80y 73d), with no sourcing. I have seen a few other conjectures as to who her parents were, such as other known Abigail Parkers, with other birthdates, but without any real evidence.

Mary (née Ryder) (Hodge) Ames (1807–1881)

Ireana married Nathan in Dorset, Vermont on 1794-12-14. She had seven children, all supposedly by him and born in Bristol:

• Clarissa (*1796)
• Harriet (*1800)
• Mariah (*1802)
• Irena (*1804)
• Nathan (*1806)
• Mary (*1807)
• William (*1811)

DNA

There was a Cushman/Croucheman DNA project, which at one point had good documentation with pedigrees and charts, but seems to have disappeared off the Internet, in lieu of a fairly barren FamilyTreeDNA project. My recollection is that the evidence validates two or maybe three generations beyond Ireana.

I have found autosomal matches to relatives that go through Ireana, but they are so distant that this does not give me much more confidence that I am descended from her.

Nathan Sr. only had two sons, and William (*1811), although he had three sons, had no grandchildren (although his son James and his wife adopted a daughter). Thus, Y-DNA alone cannot be used to exclude Nathan as my ancestor.

Ancestry