What difference can one DNA test make?

When I got into DNA testing and genetic genealogy a few years ago, I learned about the "fishing in all ponds" philosophy. Basically, you test everyone you can, everywhere you can. The more tests you have out there, the more hooks in the water you have so to speak, and the more matches you're likely to make. So I tested my three living grandparents and my mom (my maternal grandfather passed away before I was born) at 23andMe, and transferred their data to FamilyTreeDNA, and then to MyHeritage. I tested my wife, my sister, a maternal aunt and myself at Ancestry, and counted myself covered. As mysteries began to unfold and my desire to see what DNA could really tell me grew, I tested additional relatives - my maternal aunt and uncle, my wife's parents, some more distant cousins, all at 23andMe or FamilyTreeDNA (I even sprung for one for a guy in Ireland I met through a mailing list, though he turned out to not be a match). Through these tests, I've found some amazing people, and learned incredible things about my family's past and present. Then, as I've started to do more genetic genealogy as a career, I've come to see AncestryDNA in a whole new light - the light of "we have 14 million people who have taken our test." For those who are adopted or for whatever other reason have no knowledge of their parents or other close relatives, AncestryDNA has become an absolutely essential test, primarily because of the sheer number of people who have tested there. The tools they offer are pretty good (though I would really love a chromosome browser) but since DNA testing is often a numbers game, you need to test where the chances of finding a match are greatest.

With that thought burning in my mind the last few months, I decided to expand my AncestryDNA testing group to include my parents, my paternal grandfather, and my mom's cousin Renne't (there's a mystery ancestor in her line I want to identify). For Renne't, I'm really excited about finding matches on her mystery line, and figuring out who that guy was. For my mom, it's more about finding people with new info and maybe some stories or pictures. For my grandpa, it's all about finding close matches to help me get past some brick walls, primarily on his Gibson/Cain side. I'm stuck at his great-grandparents, and DNA seems to be my one hope in getting past them. I have been waiting on the edge of my seat for the last week or two, waiting for his results to come in. I even saw him during the day today, and when he asked about the test, all I could say was "it's almost there." Then, when I came home tonight, the results were ready! At last!!

I started to dig in and was immediately shocked - he had 3 matches at the 2nd cousin level I had never heard of, and 16 matches at the 3rd cousin level!! I started working on determining how these close matches were related to him. His closest 2nd cousin turned out to be a descendant of his grandfather Samuel Joseph's brother Heinrich Joseph. Another 2nd cousin is a Joseph relative, though I'm not sure how yet. The third is a Gibson/Cain match, so I'm thinking she is a descendant of John Gibson and Catherine Cain somehow. So far so good!

This is where it gets really exciting. As I was scrolling through his 3rd cousins, one of them has the last name of Rosenke. My jaw DROPPED. Rosenke is one of the variations Samuel Joseph's children gave in various records for their mother's maiden name, along with Rosen, Rozinko, and Rossenke. Sam's wife Pauline was probably from Volhynia, and I know she was born on 15 April 1868 (based on her death record), but I have no info on her parents, siblings, or any other relatives. So to see a DNA match with that name just made my heart jump. I checked and the match did not match with the more distant Joseph matches on Ancestry, which was good, as they shouldn't. I looked for shared Gibson matches, and didn't see any of those either. So I emailed the match, and am crossing my fingers for some good results.

In addition to the Rosenke connection, I found two matches with trees going back to Dennis Cain and Catherine Mulhearn, my grandpa's great-grandparents. I found another match with the Gibson surname, who I think is descended from my grandpa's uncle Thomas Gibson, who lived in Idaho. Then the one that got me most excited of all - a match with a Gibson ancestor from County Fermanagh, Ireland!! Her ancestor, Ann Gibson, was born in 1844 and married in County Fermanagh in 1866. Ann's father was Andrew Gibson, and he would have been about the same age as my grandpa's great-grandfather, Henry Gibson. This is the first time I've found anything about a connection to someone outside of Henry and his wife Ann (Stephenson) Gibson in the same place in Ireland my ancestors came from! There's a shared match that also descends from the same Ann Gibson. I emailed the matches, and while they may not have much info beyond their ancestor Ann, at least I have DNA matches with Gibson ancestry from the same location. That's a lot more than I had yesterday!

All of this came from one DNA test, and just the first couple hours of looking into the match list. I can't wait to see what there is to see when I really get into it! Plus my dad's results are pending, as are Renne't's, and with a little luck, I may get a couple of my dad's siblings to take a test for me as well, so my grandmother's DNA gets more representation on Ancestry.

So to answer the question I posed in the title - one DNA test can make ALL the difference. Even after 6 years of genetic genealogy research on my family, it seems I've only scratched the surface!

Kenneth Russell Feil - another baby gone too soon

Today, I had the chance to work on my own genealogy, and had my 10-year-old daughter Leah help me. She loves typing on a computer, and we've had some fun doing genealogy in the past, so she was excited to help me today. We started looking at the siblings of my 3rd-great-grandmother, Amelia (Waechter) Beilstein, who was born in Ohio in 1854. I saw that I didn't have much information on the family of Amelia's oldest brother, William Henry Waechter, so we started looking for info on his wife and their kids. We saw that William and his wife Annie (Schwartz) Beilstein had four children total, all born before 1900. One of those children didn't live to see 1900, but because he or she died before Pennsylvania started requiring birth and death certificates, I don't know if I'll be able to identify that fourth little one. That is especially sad to me, as I am the father of four children, and my fourth child, Levi, passed away at the age of two months. I would be devastated at the though of his memory being lost. But my grandpa's uncle John Henry Gibson (whose identity took me years to uncover because he likely died young as well) was finally identified several years after I first learned of his existence. So maybe someday I'll find this little cousin one day too.

Leah and I started looking up William and Annie's grandchildren, and found their oldest child Edna (Waechter) Holmes had three kids. I showed Leah how to add them to the database, and she had fun putting them in. It's so fun to see her get into it! While finding Edna's kids, we stumbled across her brother Russell's family, and found that he and his wife Annie (Deist) Waechter also had three kids. We had to break to get some lunch, and get things done around the home, and then I got back to genealogy later in the day. I decided to find the family of William and Annie's middle child, Florence Waechter. It turns out she and her older sister Edna got married at about the same time. However, Florence and her husband, Albert Feil, went on to have 12 children - twice as many as both her siblings put together! I wonder why they chose to have so many - was it a conscious choice, or did it just happen that way?

However, one thing stood out about Florence and Albert's children - they lost a little boy, their fourth child. His name was Kenneth Russell Feil, and he was born 28 May 1917. Exactly three months later, on 28 August 1917, he died of "cholera infantum," with asthma contributing to his death.

My heart just went out to Florence and Albert. They had lost their fourth child, like Florence's parents had lost one of their four children, like I lost my fourth child. But while William and Annie didn't have any more kids, Florence went on to become a mother eight more times.That staggers me. Putting herself out there, her very heart out there, more than half a dozen more times shows so much strength and fortitude to me. Maybe it was the times they lived in - one of the censuses for William and Annie had 8 or 9 families on the same page, and all but two had lost at least one child (one family lost both of the two they'd had). We tend to think of infant loss as something rare in our day and age, thanks to modern advances in medicine and technology. I found out when Levi passed away, that child loss is still very much a thing today. We may not lose them for the same reasons, but we do still lose them. My own son's cause of death was bronchopneumonia (though his regular physician felt it might have been SIDS). These things just happen, and they still happen.

Anyways, I couldn't find anything for the cemetery where the death certificate said he was buried. The name was Swartz Cemetery in Mars, Pennsylvania. The name Swartz makes me wonder if it was connected to the family of his grandmother, Annie (Schwartz) Waechter. I did some quick searching, but couldn't find a cemetery record for him anywhere. I hope he has a stone somewhere. I checked Ancestry, and there are a few family trees that have Kenneth in them. That made me smile - his memory has not been lost. Even without a stone, his memory is alive in the genealogy world and that is wonderful.