In Week 2 of "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks," I introduced you to my adopted great-grandmother, Minnie, and my conclusion that I'd need to learn to use genetic genealogy to ever find her parents. The following week, as I attempted those methods for the first time, I found DNA relatives in an unexpected place as I realized I'd traced down the birth father of my maternal grandmother, who wasn't the man to whom her mother was married. Here's the story of the next research venture, which was unexpectedly fruitful (intoned in a very foreshadow-y voice).
One positive outcome of having identified a "new" great-grandfather through DNA was that I'd learned a bunch, including just how "possible" my quest to find Minnie's parents might be. Armed with that optimism, I sorted out a new cluster of "mystery" matches, all of whom shared DNA with me and with each other but not with any of my known ancestors. This cluster was interesting because the largest match was to Paula G_______*. The amount of shared DNA indicated that we might share an ancestor as recent as a great-great-grandparent, although the connection could be much more distant. Paula had profiles on both 23andme and Ancestry (same name, same shared DNA amount = likely same person) but did not have any helpful family trees, nor did she respond to any private messages.
That's amazingly common, by the way. A lot of people do a DNA test, log in to see the "ethnicity" results, i.e. "I thought I should be playing the bagpipes but now I'm wearing liederhosen!" and then never log in again, and send any messages they get from the app straight to junk mail.
But Paula had done me one huge favor -- she had put two surnames that were not the same as her own in her 23andme profile. And she had indicated that she lived in... Australia!
This interested me greatly, as Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver would say. My known ancestors had all been in North America for a long time. If Paula or her parents had moved to Australia from the U.S., she could be a "known" cousin I just hadn't yet traced. But if her family was more rooted in Australia, she was more likely to be from a completely undiscovered branch, such as that of my adopted great-grandmother.
Using those three surnames from Paula's profile to create a (private and unsearchable, i.e. 'just for me') family tree turned out to be amazingly simple. Australian records and newspapers are largely online and very available. It turned out that Paula is in her 80s and both she and her parents had been born in Victoria, as had her father's parents and grandparents. Her maternal grandmother and grandfather, however, were born in St. Columb Minor, a tiny town in Cornwall, England. While our DNA connection could have still been through the Australian ancestors, this Cornwall lead seemed more promising, simply because of those typical migration patterns. The real test would be in seeing whether I could find a Most Recent Common Ancestor with Paula's and my other shared matches.
Some shared matches had at least rudimentary trees; others had distinctive names or other details in their profiles, and still others had impenetrable user names without any hints at all. I built as many trees as I could and ended up finding five of the shared matches who, like Paula, were descended from Richard Moffatt and his wife, Mary Jane Sleeman. And it appeared from cemetery rosters that their ancestors had lived in St. Columb Minor for a VERY long time before that. Are you having scenes from 'Poldark' running through your mind right now? Because I was!
Now the challenge was to build the trees "forward" in time, to see where all the Moffatt kids and grandkids went -- and whether one of them might have had a daughter born in June of 1877.
I hadn't realized how much the Irish potato famine of the 1840s impacted European food prices and cost of living, but there were food riots in Cornwall and across the British Isles. While many Moffatts, including Paula's grandparents, didn't leave England until the 1870s (part of the "assisted migration" program, maybe?), Richard and Mary Jane's "middle" son, Richard Robert Moffatt, and his wife, Elizabeth Eggleston, and their seven children sailed for New York at the height of the troubles in 1847 and then made their way to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Nope, I have not figured out why. A mining connection, perhaps? I just dunno).
Now I had identified someone who might have shared DNA with Paula and the rest of that DNA match cluster AND who was actually in the United States. And Wisconsin is more or less next door to Michigan, where Minnie was adopted - I could see light at the end of the tunnel!
But that light turned out to be the fires and destruction of the Civil War. Richard's and Elizabeth's children, both male and female, all ended up migrating east to support the war effort - the young men all enlisted in the Union Army, as did the husbands of the young women. After the war ended, when they mustered out, they all chose to stay on the east coast. Most of the siblings took up residence in Washington D.C. but one son, Richard Robert Moffatt Jr., made his life in Brooklyn, New York.
Well, now. In the 1900 Census, "adopted daughter" Minnie was reported to have been born in New York in June of 1877. Here was a potential DNA connection in New York in the late 1860s. Could it be that the 1900 census, whose details had never made any sense to me, was actually correct?
According to city directories, Moffatt reported his occupation over the years as a Builder, a Mechanic, and a Civil Engineer. During the 1870s, he lived in a boardinghouse at 162 Adelphi Street in Brooklyn. He became a naturalized citizen in September of 1874 and filed a US patent for "improvements in ordnance," and then immediately then sailed for England and filed the same patent claim there. In later years, his occupation was listed as "Inventor." Beginning about 1885, he was on the Board of Trustees for the Brooklyn Electric Construction Company, whose aim was to produce electricity and manufacture lamps and other machines that would operate on electricity. He was granted several more patents, which he assigned to that company, where it appears he was an investor. He moved from Adelphi street to increasingly more prosperous addresses.
In 1881, at the age of 41, Moffatt married the 17-year-old daughter of his landlord. Annie died five years later, apparently without having children and amazingly of tuberculosis and not childbirth. In 1891, Moffatt married 17-year-old Emma Armstrong, and they had three children. Richard Robert Moffatt died in 1906 at the age of 66.
I would imagine that, like me, you're seeing a bit of a pattern there and not liking it overmuch. While times and customs were different, and while there could be a great many practical reasons for such marriages, the picture presented by the facts thus far creeps me out.
Then, as I tried to further reconstruct Richard R. Moffatt's life, the following record popped up on Ancestry.com, an index reference to New York Birth Certificates, 1866-1909:
Huh. Was this "my" Richard Moffatt? Who was Libbie Barker? (Was she 17?) When did this birth occur? "Almer"?
Amazingly, the State of New York, which is notoriously stingy and litigious when it comes to releasing historical records, has digitized many of the early New York City birth, marriage and death records. I learned that the "Certificate Number" in the above index can actually be used to pull up an image of the original birth record:
Here we find that Richard Moffatt was the father of a girl born at Brooklyn Maternity Hospital in Brooklyn very early in the morning of June 3, 1877. He was a Mechanic. The mother's residence is given as "Adelphia Street." No such street has ever existed in Brooklyn, but "my" Richard Moffatt, a Mechanic, lived on Adelphi Street in 1877.
The world lurched a bit and I had to take a deep breath. It seemed almost certain that this baby girl was my great-grandmother!
Given that "Barker" is shown as both Libbie's maiden name and her current name, it sounds as though the couple was not married. Examination of contemporaneous certificates shows that doctors were rather random about how they recorded names even for couples who were married. However, I have not yet found a marriage record, and we know that things didn't go "happily every after" for this child. For me, that qualifies this stunning find under the theme for this week: "oops," the time-honored label for an unplanned pregnancy.
Genealogy researchers will all tell you of goose-bumps they get when they find mis-filed documents or stumble across an obscure clue that leads them to identification of an ancestor. We say "sometimes, it seems like they just want to be found." We have since learned that my brother (and, yes, DNA confirms he's really my brother!) doesn't share significant DNA with Paula or the others in the cluster that led me to the Cornwall Moffatts. With the random inheritance of DNA, especially from our more distant ancestors, finding material from anything beyond a 2nd cousin becomes a losing proposition, but, providentially, I ended up with enough of the stuff -- as did those shared matches -- to enable us to connect those dots. And then I had the tremendous good fortune to find the father's name on a birth record! Without it, I doubt that I ever could have pinpointed Minnie's father with any real confidence.
And now I had a name for her mother, as well.
I corresponded with one of the shared DNA matches who was also descended from the Cornish family. She provided this image that she said had been identified as her father's uncle, but she believed, based on the clothing, that the image was older, and likely of her father's great-uncle, Richard Robert Moffatt, my great-great grandfather, instead. Is it just me or is there a resemblance between him and Minnie?
*Information about living persons has been altered to protect their privacy.
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