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!

One more for the Cain family

As I was wrapping up my last post on the Cain family history, I did some quick searching on Ancestry to confirm one or two of the dates as I was writing about. While searching, I came across this little gem.

It's an immigration record for Mary Patricia Kane, my 2nd cousin twice removed, and a great-granddaughter of Dennis and Catherine Cain. What's crazy is that this is an immigration record for her to enter Brazil! She was 50 years old at the time, and traveling to Brazil, though I'm not sure why. I haven't tried to Google translate it yet, so maybe the record itself will tell me something about why she went there. I know she came back to the States, because she died in 1992 and is buried in the same Tacoma cemetery as her father, Joseph Patrick Kane. I want to go visit that cemetery now and see where my Kane relatives are situated there. Maybe there's a Kane family plot?

What's really cool about this record (aside from the connection to Brazil) is the photograph. It's rare to find something out of the blue for a cousin that has a picture attached, and so much family info as well.

Cain history page 10 - The descendants of Dennis and Catherine

We come now to the final page of the Cain history. This is the shortest page of the whole thing, but it does have some really good information on it.

This page basically serves to list which of Dennis and Catherine's grandchildren were alive at the time the history was written. The author lists 8 - Anthony's son Joseph; 4 of John's children, Alice Jewel (aka Julia), Arthur, and Cyril; and three of Catherine's children, Annie, Tom and Fred. This list helps determine when this history was written, as shown below.

Anthony Cain had 5 children that I know of, Joseph, Isabel, Clara, Alexander, and Catherine. Joseph was the oldest, born in 1873, and died in Tacoma, Washington (not far from me!) in 1967.  I don't have death dates for any of his other children, but apparently the author knew or believed they'd all died before then. It's definitely possible since they were born in the 1870s-1880s.

John Cain had 9 children - Alice, Catherine Irene, Julia/Jewel, Arthur, Francis Joseph, John Francis, John Elliott, Anthony, and Cyril. Alice died in 1953, Francis and John Francis died in 1888 and 1889 respectively as infants. John Elliott died sometime before 1940, and Anthony died in 1942. I don't have death dates yet for Catherine Irene, Julia, Arthur, or Cyril, but apparently Catherine had passed away before the history was written, so presumably sometime before 1953.

Catherine had 5 children - Annie Condon, John Henry, Thomas, John Frederick, and David. John Henry died as a baby or young child sometime before 1900. Thomas died in 1954. David passed away in 1960, Fred in 1967, and Annie last in 1971. If the history was written before Alice died in 1953, then David should have been listed as a living grandchild as well as Tom, Annie, and Fred. My guess is she either didn't know he was still alive or forgot to include him. Sorry, Dave.

All in all this has been a very interesting history of my Cain family. I have some really interesting leads to follow up on, especially in New Brunswick. I need to go back through these posts and compile a list of them for easy reference, and just start checking them off, one by one. Then it's on to the next project or lead. I love this stuff!

Cain family history page 9 - End of an era

Today's post goes over the penultimate page of the Cain family history, which discusses the last few years of Dennis's life.

The author starts off by discussing how opportunities for education difficult for the non-wealthy to obtain. Some of Dennis and Catherine's children apparently went to a public school taught by a schoolmaster named McCann (except for Catherine, who attended the Sacred Heart convent). The younger children, she says, had a better chance to go to school. There only four boys that I know of that could have gone to school, and the author doesn't say which were taught by McCann and which had the "better chance" (whatever that meant). 

Catherine is said to have had a "very lovely soprano voice," and a natural talent for music, being able to play anything she heard. My cousin Tyeler has a natural talent for music, being able to both play and sing really well. It would be pretty cool if that was a talent he inherited from Catherine. What I don't understand is the part where it says music teachers weren't very good in those days. I find it hard to believe that good music teachers are a recent development, given the quality of music that has existed for at least the last several hundred years. 

The author says Dennis's wife Catherine died in the early 1880s, and that is accurate - she died in 1881, not long after the census was taken that year. She mentions how the family scattered after her death, with sons Anthony and John going to Minneapolis, Catherine and Dennis going to Montana, and sons David and Thomas following Catherine. She says David died just a few years after leaving Saint John. It looks like I had a record of David Cain's death in Montana in 1889, but I can't find it now. I'll have to get that back. I learned a while ago that Thomas died apparently unmarried in Seattle in 1935, though the informant was apparently a relative named J.P. Kane from Tacoma. 

The family did scatter like the author says. I have made contact with a descendant of John Cain, that's who sent me this history. I've traced some of Anthony's descendants down to the 1920s, so that line was still around back then. I think Anthony, John, and Catherine were the only children of Dennis and Catherine to have children of their own. I wonder how many of us there are in total. I think I'll do a descendant count, and see how large a posterity Dennis and Catherine have, at least that I've found so far.

Cain, Kane, O'Kane - which is it?

I know I haven't posted on here for a few months, but it's for a very good reason - I switched careers! I am now employed by Legacy Tree Genealogists as a researcher on their DNA team! I could not be happier with the change in jobs, getting to do something I love and being able to support my family with it is literally a dream come true for me. Making that dream come true took some doing, and in all the hubbub, blogging had to go to the back burner for a few months. Things are still a little crazy, but I wanted to take just a few minutes tonight because it's Family History Month again.

A little over a month ago, I received an email from a cousin of mine on my Cain side, the Irish great-grandparents of my grandpa Fred Gibson. The email contained the scans of a handwritten history, written by a descendant of Dennis Cain, which detailed Dennis's origins in Northern Ireland, named his parents, told how he met his wife in Canada, and other juicy tidbits. It also said his last name was originally O'Kane, not Cain as it was written in Canadian records, or Kane as it was spelled in the US. It makes me wonder which was the real name? If I could find original records in Ireland to corroborate the O'Kane name, that would be really cool.

One interesting thing I noticed on the first page, is there is an Arthur Kane listed as one of Dennis and Catherine's children. I have records for Anthony, Eliza Jane, John, Catherine, David, and Thomas, but no Arthur. I wonder where that name came from? For Eliza, I only have her birth record, so I think she may have died as an infant or toddler.

Last bit of analysis of this first page. First off, it's written by the granddaughter of Dennis Cain (I'm sticking with that spelling until I see different in other records), Catherine Irene (Cain) Taraldson, who also went by Veronica (because you can never have too many names, right?). It's Catherine's recollection of her father's recollection of his father's story. At best, we're two tellings removed, and who knows how many years. Not to cast doubt on her story, but some things stand out right off - John O'Kane, the alleged father of Dennis, was born in Belfast in 1785. Belfast (according to Wikipedia) boomed a few decades after John's birth, but it was still a big town then. From what I've learned about Irish genealogy, you have to go beyond big town names, and drill down to the teeny tiny townlands to find out where folks are really from. Belfast is so big, it makes me suspect that it's too general to be entirely accurate. Who know, I could be wrong though. Bears looking into at least.

Next time, we'll look at page two!