Wordless Wednesday - SS Tunisian

SS Tunisian - courtesy of www.greatships.net

This is a postcard bearing a picture of the SS Tunisian. This is the passenger ship my Joseph ancestors sailed on, leaving Liverpool, England on 5 Oct 1905, and arriving in Montreal, Quebec eight days later on 13 Oct 1905.

Tombstone Tuesday - Pauline (Rosen) Joseph

This is the gravestone of my 2nd-great-grandmother, Pauline (Rosen) Joseph. I don't know much about her, as I've only found her in a very few records so far. The earliest record I have of her is the passenger lists departing Liverpool, England (she was originally from Russia, specifically the Volhynia area of what is now Ukraine) and arriving in Montreal, Quebec in October 1905. The next record is the 1906 Census of Manitoba, where she's listed with her husband, Samuel, and their five children - Olga, Augusta, Lydia, Amil (aka Elmer), and Helena. Sadly, the next records she appears in are her death records, one from Christ Lutheran Church in Winnipeg, and the province-issued death certificate. The church's death record gives her birth date as 15 April 1868, which is interesting considering she's buried in that same church's cemetery, where her gravestone gives her a birth date of 11 April 1867.

But all in all, I know so little about her. I'd like to learn more, and hopefully with some help from the SGGEE (Society of German Genealogy in Eastern Europe) and other resources, I'll be able to track down some more information on her.

I'm stuck

And it's not even on a brick wall. I'm stuck as to what I want to do next with my genealogy. I've been working on my German family history class - so fascinating to learn the history of the area where so much of my ancestry traces back to. And to finally understand what many of those place names like Silesia, Pomerania, Hessen, and Alsace-Lorraine that I've come across over the years actually refer to! I've also been working on my DNA analyisis, though I can't seem to decide which test to focus on, or which ancestral line I want to try to isolate and trace. I want to do something to prepare for the DNA conference I'm going to in a couple weeks (!) but I don't know what. Then there are the lines where I've had breakthroughs in the last year or so - specifically the Josephs, Bergstads, and Zitzmanns, where I have a pile of records in the original languages of my ancestors, but not enough linguistic skill to read them fluently and analyze them properly. I still have a number of brick walls or confusing lines I want to work more on - Samuel Joseph's second and third wives are still little more than names (though I did recently find corroboration of the addresses of the witnesses to his second marriage, to Elizabeth Ackermann); Pauline (Rosen) Joseph is still a mystery, as I have her death date and place, and a birth year but not much else; and my Gibson/Cain lines are still hard to find in New Brunswick. Then there are my online family trees that have been pretty neglected lately - Wikitree, FamilySearch, and Tribal Pages all need updating. So much to do! Is this what they mean by an embarrassment of riches?

Maybe I just need to sit down and make a list of all the loose ends I've got, and decide which ones I want to focus on. I thought once I finished the Project, my next course of action would be clear, but so far, I kinda feel like I'm spinning my wheels. 

if you were me, where would you start?

Wordless Wednesday - Zitzmann/Sitzman family relatives

Here's a photo of some of my Zitzmann/Sitzman side relatives. From the back - Charles Wagner Jr, Ellen Richter, Rosie Wagner, Mary Hoffman, Jane Richter, Eileen Nelson, Ron Wagner

Wordless Wednesday - Craddock family

This is a photo of the family of my great-grandma, Edna Craddock (who is the only one missing from the photo; wonder if she was behind the camera?). From left to right, there's Hazel Craddock, Philena (Beilstein) Craddock, Elsie Craddock, Ernest L. Craddock, and Grace Craddock. It was probably taken in Montana. I don't have a date for the picture, but Grace was born in 1920, and Lena and Ernest had separated by 1930, so I'd guess probably 1928-29.

Coming to America - the Bergstads leave Norway

I recently discovered some amazing family history information thanks to FamilySearch's Norway Genealogy Research Community on Facebook. How I didn't know that there were these communities on Facebook is beyond me, but I'm so glad I know about them now.

As I've written about before, my cousin Delores Olson sent me a whole bunch of documents about and pictures of my Bergstad relatives and ancestors. One of those was a page from a family Bible, with names and birth dates of my 2nd-great-grandfather Knut J. Bergstad and his siblings in Wisconsin, but all written in Norwegian. I could make out the names and dates, but couldn't read some of the other words written on the page, and posted the image on the research community's wall. Here's what it looks like, with my ancestor's name marked with a red star.

A short while later, I had a couple responses confirming my reading of the names and dates, and that the extra language meant "came into the world on". They also helped me find them in the 1860 and 1870 US Federal censuses, which I'd previously been unable to do (mostly because until recently, I didn't know that they hadn't been using Bergstad as the family surname until after 1870). But then they went one step further. One of the posters had gone to the Norwegian Digital Archives website (in a lot of ways the the be-all and end-all site for Norwegian research) and using the info I provided, found the birth record of my 3rd-great-grandfather Johannes Sjursen Bergstad (father of all those in the Bible page), all of his siblings I knew about, the marriage of his parents Sjur Johanneson Bergstad and Anna Johnsdatter Horvei, Sjur's baptism record, and the immigration record of Sjur and Anna's family leaving Norway in 1847!! Talk about doing the genealogy happy dance!! I'd had some info for these people for years, but no original documentation to back it up. Suddenly I had all kinds of original records!

As I started going through the records and entering them into my database, I noticed something. While going through the list of family members that immigrated in 1847, there was a name that I didn't recognize in between my Johannes Sjursen (my 3rd-great-grandfather) and John Sjursen (his next oldest sibling). It looked like there was another child in between Johannes and John!

 

Since I had the links to John's and Johannes' birth records, and any child born between Johannes and John should be listed in the same parish register, I decided to just start going through, page by page, and see if I couldn't find this mystery child. After one hour of searching, I found her!

 

 

I'm still not very familiar with Norwegian handwriting, so I couldn't quite read the name. It looked like it might be Regtteve or Brytteve but I'd never heard of either of those names. I asked the Norway community page again, and went Google searching. Eventually I hit on this website called Nordic Names. I tried searching for a few variations of the mystery name until I found one that looked just right - Brytteva. It also said the name is local to Hordaland county, exactly where my ancestors are from! The Norway research group confirmed my guess that the name is in fact Brytteve. So my ancestor had a younger sister named Brytteve or Brytteva, who lived at least long enough to make the journey to wonder if I can find her in any American census or vital records? That's a question that'll have to wait for another day.

 

Once I had the names all figured out, I went to Ancestry.com to see if I could find a passenger list record for them arriving Stateside. It didn't take long before I found that they arrived at the port of New York on 30 June 1847 on the ship Albion.

 

 

At first I thought this meant they came through Castle Garden, but it turns out Castle Garden didn't accept immigrants until 1855, 8 years after my ancestors had already landed. So I'll have to find out how the port of New York was situated in 1847 to find out what it was like when they landed.

 

This makes the third set of ancestors that I now have immigration records on, the others being my 2nd-great-grandfather Samuel Joseph and his family, and my great-grandmother Rose Sitzman/Zitzmann and her mom, sister, and aunts and uncles. It's amazing to be able to say I know exactly when these branches of my family arrived in this country. These records are so fascinating!

Back again to Africa

In this third and final post in the series of my African DNA segments (click here to see parts one and two), I'm going to be looking at my paternal grandmother's DNA results. According to 23andMe, grandma has a little segment of African DNA on her 9th chromosome, comprising about 3.9% of the chromosome. This one is different from the segments found in my paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother's tests, however, in that the DNA is identified as North African, while the other two were both Sub-Saharan African.



Let's start the comparison by looking at the Dodecad admixture tool, which has four African populations. According to their chromosome painting tool, grandma shows positive for Palaeo-African, and possibly Northwest African a little to the right of the Palaeo-African.

 

When I pull up the numbers for Dodecad, both Palaeo-African and Northwest African are zeroes, but East African shows 2.2%.

 



This is much less than the 3.8% predicted by 23andMe. Not a very good match-up, but at least this tool's breakdown and the graph both showed African DNA.

On to Eurogenes' admixture tool. It only has one African population, West African, which shows up quite clearly on chromosome 9.

When we look at the percentage breakdown, however, West African comes up empty.

Given the size of the other populations assigned to chromosome 9, the African segment may have just been too small for the calculator to detect. Or it may have just been absorbed into the ethnicities surrounding it. Whatever the reason, the numbers and the graph don't agree for this section of this chromosome.

Now for the HarappaWorld admixture tool. This one has four African populations, and I can pick out three of them in the graph - San, Pygmy, and West African. I'm not sure if Pygmy is the largest of the three, or just stretched out by the graph tool.

The numbers show hits in two populations, Pygmy and San, but no West African. Pygmy is quite a bit smaller than San. The total percentage of African DNA that HarappaWorld sees on chromosome 9 is 0.5%. This is drastically smaller than either 23andMe or Dodecad, 3.3% and 1.7% smaller respectively. I wonder why they see the same stretches of DNA so differently.

And finally, the MDLP tool. This tool has three African populations, but grandma only showed positive for Pygmy DNA.

And what do the numbers show? No African DNA at all.

That's the second tool that has shown grandma having African DNA in the graph, but not in the percentage breakdown. With no breakdown, I don't have any numbers to compare to the other two that did give me percentages for the African DNA. But the graph agrees that there is African DNA there.

What have I learned from going through all of this? Several things:

1. Admixture analysis is far from being an exact science. The chromosome painting offered by one tool can, and often does, disagree with the percentage breakdown of the same tool. Clearly there's some fine tuning still to come in this.

2. Even when multiple tools do agree on the general ethnicity of a segment, they disagree (sometimes wildly) on the segment's size. I think this is part of #1, but it was interesting to see (especially in my paternal grandmother's DNA) the varying sizes of the African DNA segments. I wonder if this is due to the ongoing work to determine the origin of the various AIMs or SNPs used in these calculators, or just the way the computer tallies the info.

3. Although the numbers disagreed with the populations shown in the graphs, every graph on every tool showed African DNA in the same place of the same segment of the same chromosome. This was the most interesting part. All the projects (I'm assuming) are based on different base populations, from different regions and using varying numbers of people. But they all showed African DNA just where 23andMe originally did. I don't know how conclusive that is overall, but until someone comes up with a pretty reason to reject this hypothesis, I'm going to believe that all three of my grandparents analyzed have these little chunks of African DNA.

4. If my hypothesis is correct, and this really is African DNA that's showing up my grandparents' DNA tests, that means I have three African ancestors somewhere back in my ancestry, one in each of my grandparents' family trees. Given the size of the segments, that ancestor is probably too far back to trace to by paper genealogy, unless I hit a HUGE stroke of luck one day. But it's fascinating to see something in my genealogy that I probably would never have seen any other way.

5. My mom's DNA test showed her as having the same African segment as my maternal grandmother, but no other. She only has half of my maternal grandfather's DNA, so I'd have to test my aunt and uncle to see if his side had any African. I'd like to do that someday, time and finances willing.