DNA cousin connections - the ones with NO dates, and so much private - but a tree!

 A common lament for those of us who engage in researching family history using DNA connections is the one with NO dates listed, no indication of country, no indication of their rough age, and name.

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED

For the past several years, a DNA cousin of mine has eluded me in terms of our connection. A 66cm match for me, 52cm match for my brother, not a match for my mother (my father died before I had a chance to get him to test). So yes, the obvious is I can narrow it down to my paternal side...but THIS is what I had to work with:

first and last name for 3 of 4 grandparents...how was I to figure out what seemed an impossible task. Spoiler alert (I did figure it out, and this is how):

I had NO idea who this dna match was to me, but with a 66cm, and 52cm match, I narrowed it down to a likely 3rd cousin - and perhaps as distant as a 4th, and added the "removed" possibility of a generation as it seems both parents are alive, and possibly one of 4 grandparents.

This took me to looking only at paternal lines of mine, and no more distant than my 3x great grandparents. I felt it most likely to be a match with one of my great grandparents, or 2x great grandparents, so I began from what I felt the closest possibilities were. I looked at our shared matches and was able to narrow it down to 4 of my 2x great grandparents as possibilities. I sort my DNA matches by known ancestor, and in unknown maternal and paternal for those I haven't figured out.

The first names available - Robert, George, Annie...sigh. For my match, I took the last names of George and Robert and started searching for possible parent matches, phone directories, city directories, marriages, anything...a few possibilities came up, all in England. None of my ancestors were from England so I was going to try the two names that had the best Irish or Scottish possibilities. Thanks to the middle initial of Annie being the one additional clue provided, I was able to narrow down the marriage of my DNA cousin's grandparents to less than half a dozen, all in England.

I then also looked at Robert's side, and his last name, also Scottish, and set to work in my own tree (I have just over 10,000 names in the tree I have built and researched over nearly 20 years).

I started from closest relations and went through my dad's journals, and great aunts and uncles and all of those I didn't have a huge amount of documentation for. I narrowed in on my father's AUNT. She had died in childbirth at the age of 29, my father had said her husband had committed suicide soon after, crashing a Rolls Royce. He had no details of her husband's name. My father did write the first names of the children, and what he thought was his aunt's name and position in the family. The children's first names were all correct. His aunt's name, and her being the youngest were not. Last week I found and paid for the death certificate I felt might be this aunt's husband's death. It confirmed he had worked in the motor transport industry, and he had died from fractures to the skull and nose less than 3 weeks after she died. I felt like this HAD to be a great possibility for this strong DNA cousin match that I have been struggling to figure out for years.

For this aunt, I had already written out many theories, and found enough voter registration lists and other documents to know his last name. I don't know where the 3 children lived and grew up as they were so young when they lost both their parents, and they did not stay in touch with my father and his family - when they died, he lost 3 first cousins to tragedy and time and the World War that would begin only a year later.

But I had a prospective last name to search with. Could this be Robert's wife? the living PRIVATE grandmother of my DNA match. I searched more records, one of the orphaned cousins popped up in Scotland in a marriage that would fit the approximate marrying age of my father's 1st cousin - in Scotland. I tested the theory and immediately found several public registers (voter registrations/phone books/city directories - these are go to's for me). CONFIRMED

This vague, undetailed tree with less than a handful of names, thanks to the steps I followed and a middle initial to help, solved a years' long mystery - not just for how I matched this DNA cousin, but what happened to the children orphaned after the tragic loss of their parents. One of my father's 1st cousins had something of a tragic end - in his 40s, in the US, alcoholism named in his death certificate, alone, without family, but the other 2 had remained in Scotland and built lives and future generations.

the DNA match - my second cousin, once removed. My great grandparents, her 2x great grandparents. Her father is my second cousin. 

Continue

Air Raid Shelters

 Am re-reading my father's journals. My father was a child in the UK when WW2 broke out - old enough to remember, young enough to not have the emotional tools to process the chaos and dangers around him.

I try not to be sad, my relationship with my father was complicated, much was resolved in the years before he died, but it is still bittersweet knowing how much might have been different had he not been traumatized by war at such an important, formative stage of his life.

As I re-read the Anderson shelter popped up. Not sure why I didn't document it before, but my father's family, like thousands of families across the UK, were issued an Anderson Shelter that was to be built by the families far enough from the home, and deep enough into the ground that it might afford some protection in a bombing. They were sent information on what to do when they heard the air raid sirens, they did drills, a seismic shift in every day life.

My father journalled how several of the neighbours made quick work of their construction and installation by doing it together, that they had been issued in 1938 - the sense that war was coming pre-dated any official declarations, made clearer in the words of my father in his elder-years.

And so here it is - information about the widely-issued Anderson shelter for the air raids that became a frequent sound piercing the ears of my father's childhood: Anderson shelters.

Continue

to err is human (and creates brick walls in genealogy)

 I was reminded of the fallibility of first person accounts...again! And it is a bigger lesson in general in genealogy - it's not proven until it's proven!

Sigh, my father, bless his long passed soul. This time, I was pouring through his journals again, reading about his favourite aunt, Aunt Minnie. 

The errors, the errors in his recounting of her.

What he said: She was my favourite aunt, I wished she was my granny instead of my granny...she was my grandfather's sister.

The truth (many hours and years of research later): She was his grandMOTHER's younger sister. I had incorrectly placed several people with his grandfather's sister Mary (though I had also allowed for the possibility of Wilhemina or that Minnie was a middle name Mary.

A few other mis-facts included her street name, where her husband was from.

So lessons learned (again). Check BOTH sides of the family...both Mary's were almost the same age (less than 5 years apart), both from Northern Ireland, both have been a challenge to create a document trail of due to the rather common-ness of the name MARY in Ireland (!!)

Also, consider ANY and all variations for street names given to you from a first person account. Lowland Street could be Leland or Lealand, or Avenue, or Road. Be specific when possible with the neighbourhood...there are endless Bally- options in all parts of Ireland for example, or putting London could take you from the UK, and send you across the pond to London, Ontario...

It's all part and parcel of the patience one hones when truly dedicated to the pursuit of family history, of documenting it all, of weaving the stories in with the facts and making sense of it for family one may or may not have met yet, and to honour the ancestors with a bit of accuracy to boot ;)

Continue

father

 It has been just over 5 years since my father died. The last time I blogged was a year ago for my original blog that I started in 2005. I have drafts littering my dashboard...in progress, or incomplete.

I had a complicated relationship with my father. I think it is part of the reason why I still try to understand him, years after he took his last breath, in his bed at home. A home that me and my husband own, but where he resided, where he chose to have his last breath. It took time to shift from pain to trust, from resentment to heartfelt love. The father who died, was not the one I lived with for most of my life. I am grateful for this.

My father was 8 years old and living in the UK when WW2 began. Bombings, displacement, death. He built a future of fear and anger, as destruction rained down on him, he internalized this and it scarred everything with a vicious depth and ferocity that left few around him untouched by it.

I didn`t know much of those years until later in his life, until the last years and months of his life. I read about it in journals after he died. I heard him ask for my forgiveness in the last 6 months of his life. I started healing from the what-could-have-been when my children were born, and saw the pure love he showed them. I forgave him years before, when I stood up and refused to take any additional verbal assaults. I don`t know why I was his target. Something in me repulsed him. There were times growing up when he was yelling at me again for the many-dozen-th time that week, seething so much at me I could see the foamy saliva forming on the corners of his mouth. Rabidly angry at me. It took me many years to realize it wasn`t me.

In the sunshine, as sunset beamed what felt a million shades of pink and purple, the sunset of his life too, the last of the days where he was still mobile. He tearfully spoke, in a voice softened by illness, age and understanding. He spoke of his anger, how all consumed he was. How he lived in anger. How I had been the one he had targeted anger. Never a full explanation of why me. He spoke to my strength. He asked me my forgiveness. He regretted not living a life with more love. I felt so much deep, in your core sadness...could it reach any deeper. I explained again, I forgave him a long time ago. I had chosen not to live in anger or shame or resentment. I did not want a half life. I learned and saw what damage could result. I learned, painfully, but learned gratitude and forgiveness are gifts we give ourselves, they liberated me from the pain of not feeling enough, of not understanding how someone could be my parent, but despise me for simply breathing alongside them.

Healing was truly complete when I saw who he could be, when he let love in. My boys had already healed me, the bond I have with them gives me hope and gratitude and more love than I could have ever imagined in life. I saw them heal him with their love words and their hugs and joy. I saw my father through the lens of a grandfather who doted on his grandchildren. It was bittersweet as he could have been that for me, but when I saw the beautiful, perfect love form between them, I felt the sunshine of that love. I carry that with me...the feelings of seeing those moments. When I look back at the traumas of my father`s childhood, and how he passed those to me by his words and actions, I am not haunted by them. I learned what was mine and what wasn`t. I chose love. I chose myself.

I am my father, and so I try to keep learning. Genealogy is so much a part of that and am so grateful for the DNA cousins I have met along the journey. I am more drawn to dedicating time to my paternal side. I wish he could see it, that he could know so much of what I have found. I wish he had shared his stories, that it hadn`t been access to journals after he had died. But I am grateful, that despite all of the complicated, that when I said goodbye to my father, after my youngest had made a series of origami boats and placed them around his head on his pillow, that after his last ever action he had after being in a coma for over a week, was that he suddenly reached out to my children inexplicably (no medical explanation) as he hovered over death, when I said goodbye to him, I was able to fully and honestly say, that I loved him.

Continue