This week’s theme in the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge is “Out of Place.” When I think about an ancestor that showed up unexpectedly, my first genetic genealogy attempt came to mind. Here’s the story:
Saying that I was going to start using DNA in an effort to find the birth parents of my adopted great-grandmother, Minnie, was one thing but doing it was something else. I've always been more likely to buy pretty yarn than to actually knit anything. I had long ago done the easy part – provided samples and had my DNA extracted and analyzed. It was time to start knitting!
Fortunately, genetic genealogy experts are incredibly generous in sharing their expertise in videos, blogs, articles, websites and Facebook groups. Asking Google “how can I find my great-grandmother’s birth parents using DNA?” I was encouraged, if a bit overwhelmed, to find a lot of terrific resources. Some were pretty technical, but others generally outlined a process that made sense to me:
Cluster my matches into groups in which the members all share at least a bit of the same DNA. This is actually quite easy because if you select one of your matches, most of the databases will provide a list of people that match with both of you on a particular spot or spots. Then it's just a matter of grouping them somehow. Ancestry provides an extremely sophisticated option 😄, Colored Dots, so I started there.
Next, you “Do genealogy” – the records-based research – to figure out how the people in each of those groups are related to one another, identifying their Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA).
Is that MRCA already in my own family tree? Yes: Then I know how these people are related to me. Hello, cousins! No: Then this cluster is a mystery… and could lead to Minnie’s parents!
At this point in the story, it is SO hard not to lapse into a discussion of just how this all works. Like math and music, genetic genealogy is seductive in both its logic and its intricacy. However, let’s be honest – unless you are also a devotee, listening to the operational details of someone else’s passion is mind-numbing. So we’ll skip to the part where I had clustered a whole bunch of my matches, finding some clusters that didn't seem to trace back to anyone I could recognize. I decided to start with the group that included Raymond T, because Ancestry predicted he and I shared ancestors within the last few generations.
I copied Raymond’s public family tree to a private workspace and began to try to fit our shared matches into it. Over the space of several weeks, I managed to create a "research" tree that included Raymond and 39 of our shared matches. The resulting tree was broad, with lots of branches, but the matches all shared one particular couple in their ancestry. Their MRCAs were Raymond's great-great-great grandparents, Samuel and Sarah Farmer, who were born on the East Coast during the Revolutionary War but who married and raised their family in Licking County, Ohio. The next step was to trace all Samuel and Sarah's descendants forward in time to try to find where one might have intersected Minnie’s adopted parents. She had supposedly been born in June of 1877, allegedly in New York but, really, it could have been anywhere, right? Could she be a granddaughter or great-granddaughter of Samuel and Sarah? I was eagerly looking for anybody that went to Michigan (or New York), anyone with a girl child of that general age for whom I couldn't find a future. The Farmers had a LOT of children and those children also had a lot of children, so it took a bit to work my way down to the grandson that married and had a family of his own in Licking and then upped sticks and moved them all, in the mid-1860s, to the tiny hamlet of Weston, Illinois.
Weston. Fire-trucking Weston.
I've been to Weston. It is the proverbial wide spot in the road. I can assure you it is easy to miss, even when you are specifically looking for it in order to see where your maternal grandmother was born in 1895.
I’m a little proud that I didn’t waste too much time pondering what an astonishing coincidence it would be for Minnie, my paternal great-grandmother who was raised in Michigan, to have been born in the same little Illinois town as Inez, my maternal grandmother; as Occam so succinctly pointed out, there was a much more likely explanation: Inez was somehow descended from Samuel and Sarah. Checking my color coded groups, I belatedly 😳realized that, although I had several clusters that linked to ancestors of Inez's mother, Mary Rilla Allison, I didn't actually have any matches to the family of her father, Henry Frantz.
I knew Henry was from a large family of German immigrants because I'd spent a lot of microfilm time tracking their roots and emigration. While it is possible that nobody who is descended from that extended family has taken an Ancestry DNA test, it seems a bit of a stretch. On the other hand, once I plugged the Farmer shared matches into the nifty free DNA relationship analysis tool, “What are the odds?” it said that the odds are rather overwhelmingly in favor of the premise that one of the Farmer’s great-grandsons was actually Inez’s father. Two of those great-grandsons had no recorded descendants to compare against, so there’s no way to ever tell for sure which of them it might be. However, in 1901, Sebastian Farmer moved west to Minburn, Iowa, and just a few months later, Henry Frantz moved his family, including 6-year-old Inez, there, as well. It sounds as though Sebastian was allied in some way with my grandmother's family, as well as being (I believe) her father.
Nine years older than Henry, Sebastian was 16 when he enlisted in the 149th Illinois Infantry and fought in the Civil War. When he became ill in 1909, he returned from Iowa to Illinois to the National Home for Disabled Volunteers in Danville where he died later that year. Henry died in October of 1921 of ptomaine poisoning, and Mary Rilla died almost exactly a year later of tuberculosis.
According to a recent article by Paul Woodbury for Legacy Tree Genealogists, “most” people will encounter at least one instance of "misattributed parentage" in the first 8 generations of their family tree, and 13% will find one within their first three generations. In other words, I have plenty of company when it comes to DNA surprises. Although all the people involved are long dead – my grandmother died in 1970 – I’ve been surprised at how unsettling this discovery has been. Really, it's not like it changes anything, and yet, somehow, it does. I cannot even begin to imagine the shockwaves it sends through your sense of self to learn that someone whom you've known all your life is not related to you in the way you've always believed.
At least I'd had some success in using DNA to find some ancestors, although not the ones I was looking for. I turned back to my "mystery" clusters, continuing my quest to find Minnie's parents.