Gone Too Soon
- isthisagoodtime
- Feb 24, 2023
- 4 min read
This week's writing prompt in the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge is a sad one for many people, and offers a potentially overwhelming number of stories for most genealogists. In my own immediate family, my mother, her half-sister and her mother were each widowed with a one-year-old child. Mom missed my dad terribly but often said "if he showed up here this minute, the first thing I'd do is slap him and scream 'how DARE you die and leave me to raise these kids!'" Single parent families are not the modern invention many would have you believe, nor are they EVER easy. However, in my research, I ran across one even more poignant story that has haunted me, so that's the one I'll share.
In my search for Minnie, my adopted great grandmother, I'd found DNA connections that led to a man I believed was her father, and then to his name on the birth record of a baby girl born the same month and year as Minnie. The mother's name on that record was Libby Barker. Delving into the family tree of Ancestry member "BL," with whom I matched DNA in one of my "mystery" clusters, I came across John Gue Barker of San Francisco, who and his sisters, Mary Jane and Libby, all of whom were reportedly from New York.
"Libby Barker" is not a terribly distinctive name -- this was far from proof of any actual relationship. I needed more information about Libby and her siblings. I had their ages from obituaries, their father's name -- John Gue Barker Sr. -- courtesy of John's businessman's biography and even the name of their mother -- Hannah West -- from Mary Jane's obituary. Given those parameters, it should have been easy enough to find such a family in census records, at the very least. I should know better than to even think that by now!
Failing to find the family in records, I turned back to DNA, to a match that "BL" and I shared, a man we'll call "RD." On Ancestry, RD had a very nice family tree that went back four generations, which was plenty for me to use to whip together a private, unsearchable research tree. I was able to build the tree out nine generations. According to crowdsourced probability tables that use confirmed relationship DNA amounts as datapoints, RD and I should have a common ancestor within that tree. And, yet, no Barkers! Following patronymic naming conventions, unless we had another 'not-the-parent-expected' event, there should be a Barker. Instead, in fact, RD's tree shared no names with the one I'd put together for "BL."
Dang. But
Maybe I'd just made a mistake in building the tree. I started over, verifying not just my own additions but the information that had been provided by RD. Obituaries confirmed his parents' names, and census and marriage records and obituaries confirmed their parents. In looking at the timeline, though, I noticed one small anomaly -- RD's father was born a full 3 years before the marriage of the parents whose names were listed in his obituary! Discrepancies of a few months one way or another are pretty common, but a birth three years before a well-documented wedding tends to imply the child in question was part of a package deal with one parent or the other.
A cemetery search in the town where RD's father was born produced a record for "Margaret Barker, wife of [RD's grandfather]". Cemetery records showed that she was born on 24 August 1852; she was 23 when she died on 6 Apr 1876... on the same day her son was born. Three years later, RD's father remarried and his stepmother is the one named as "mother" on every document I've found (no birth registration seems to exist). Did he even realize she wasn't his birth mother?
Now I had a Barker -- Margaret -- but could I find a relationship with Libby, John and Mary Jane? Again, it wasn't straightforward, but the key was in her middle initial, "L." In the 1860 census, in Derby Landing, CT, just a few miles from where RD's father was born, 8-year-old Margaret Barker was enumerated with 70-year-old Margaret Lockwood and 29-year-old John Lockwood. I couldn't ignore a girl of the right name and the right age in such close proximity, so endeavored to learn more about this household, and found this in the Derby Landing newspaper:
(What do you suppose the business about the cake means? Was Margarette a baker of renown? Was the Rev.? I'd love to know!)
Further searching for "Margarette Barker" produced in this sad notice from Brooklyn, NY:
Then I did the math: Margarette Lockwood Barker died on August 24, 1852, the same day her namesake daughter was born. Twenty-three years later, that daughter would die exactly the same way.
According to Max Roser and Hannah Ritchie in their 2013 report on maternal mortality, in the 19th century about 500 to 1,000 mothers died for every 100,000 births -- every 100th to 200th birth led to the mother’s death. Almost 150 years later, things have improved somewhat, yet, today, women in the U.S. are still three times more likely to die as a result of pregnancy and childbirth than are those in any other developed country.
Deep Breath.
But there was a smidge of genetic genealogical good news, here: Both RD and BL appear to share an ancestor named John G. Barker, Sr.. Hopefully, he would turn out to be the Most Recent Common Ancestor that I shared with the two of them, as well. I finally had a line on some Barkers, and a likely name for Libby's father... but Libby was born 10 years after Margaret Barker's death, so now I needed to find her mother.
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