Wordless Wednesday - Clarence "Unc" Morris

This is a photo of my great-grandma Rosie (Sitzman) Wagner's second husband, Clarence Morris, whom we all called Unc. I think the nickname comes from my aunt Kathy Smith, who couldn't pronounce Clarence when my dad's family knew him in the 1950s and 60s. This picture comes from February 1969, and shows Unc in some of his fraternal order's finery. I'm not sure what order this is from though. My grandpa says Unc was a Mason, like my grandpa was, but I think the hat says "Bagdad" and it looks like it has a picture of an Arabian-style sword. I'll have to Google it and see what I come up with.

This is a photo of Donald "Bill" Wagner, his sister-in-law Claire (Thacker) Wagner (wife of his brother Ralph), and Unc, from 1978. This is more how I remember Grandpa Unc. He was always nice to me, and my folks still have some of the letters he wrote me when I was little. He passed away in 1993 at the age of 90.

Wordless Wednesday - Red Corn

This is an undated photo of my wife's earliest known Native American ancestor, Wy-e-gla-in-kah, or Red Corn in English. He was born about 1854, had three children with his first wife Me-tsa-he (after she died he married twice more), and died 9 Jan 1927 in Pawhuska, Oklahoma.

Genes Day - A long overdue DNA update

I am finally finished updating my database with all the Groff family files I've collected (and some I dug up while going through those I've already gathered) so it's time to get back into DNA research! There have been some big developments over the last few months.

I realize I left on a cliffhanger (well, hillhanger more like). I did get the results in for that Harris cousin, and she turned out to not be related to us after all. Bit of a letdown, as these tests are not cheap, but it is what it is. I'm also still trying to figure out the ethnicity calculations for my grandma's test, as everywhere I post the results, I seem to get different answers - 23andMe, GedMatch, Family Tree DNA all have different answers for the same data. There's a lot of factors that play in to the calculations, I get that, and I don't know that they'll ever be able to say "this part of your DNA is German, this is Irish, etc" with any degree of certainty. But there should be at least a general level of consensus shouldn't there? How do I know who is right, when all the answers conflict so much?

On a related note, I got a message from a new match on my mom's DNA test, wanting to compare genomes. At first, I figured this would be like all the other matches I get emailed about - one tiny segment barely large enough to qualify for a place at the end of mom's matches list. Instead, I was shocked to see that this was mom's third closest match, second only to her mom and first cousin! The new match shares a total of nine segments, for a total percentage of 2.15%! That puts the match right between the expected percentages for a second cousin (3.125%) and a second cousin once removed (1.563%). I wonder how you could fall in between those numbers like that? Anyway, I compared her data to my maternal grandma, and there was no match at all, so that means this is a match on my maternal grandfather's side. I got even more excited when I saw that one of the match's ancestral surnames was Hammer - the maiden name of my mom's paternal grandmother! So I hurriedly wrote this match an email with some info on my Hammers and...nothing. No response. After three days, I wrote a follow-up email, and this time...I got nothing. Again. I can't do much else with this connection until she writes me back. So, with the excitement slowly fading into "why the heck would you want to share genome data but not email me?" I've decided to pass the wait by looking back into some of my other tests, and going deeper into those results.

My wife Lisa also took a DNA test recently! I FINALLY got my AncestryDNA invitation and decided it would be best spent by testing a whole new branch of my family tree - hers. I'm really glad I did, because it's given me a chance to try out a new DNA product on a family line that I haven't done any DNA research on yet. Her results have been interesting, to say the least.

First up was her ethnicity. From what I knew of her ancestral background, I expected 88% European and 12% Native American, as she has one great-grandparent who was full-blood Native American (with a registered tribal membership and everything). What I got was 73% Scandinavian, 15% Persian/Turkish/Caucasus, and 12% uncertain. I was completely puzzled - from I've seen of her ancestry so far, she doesn't have any Scandinavian ancestry. I've read about Ancestry showing those with UK roots to have a higher percentage of Scandinavian heritage than may be completely accurate. But 73%??? With not a single ancestor or name indicating anyone from any Scandinavian country? Even if somehow every English ancestor of hers was a direct descendant of Vikings, this would seem too high. To be perfectly honest, I was very disappointed when I read that, because it made me think "well, this is almost completely off. Now what do I do with it?" I know Ancestry has some upgrades in the works, so I'll reserve final judgment on their ethnicity analysis for now.

The Persian/Turkish/Caucasus part of her ethnicity, I have no idea where that could be from either. It may be there's a break in the chain in one of her lines that no one knows about. That's always a possibility, I understand that. One of her 3rd-great-grandfathers was illegitimate, with no known record of who the father is, but that wouldn't account for 15% of her genetic heritage even if the father was a full-blood Turk. As far as I know, all of her ancestors (aside from the Native Americans) were from northern and central Europe - predominantly England and Germany, probably Ireland as well. So there's another big chunk of her ethnicity that just doesn't make sense, unless we have her entire tree wrong. And I hope and pray that that's NOT the case.

As for the uncertain, I'm willing to bet that that's her Native American side. The percentage is just right, and given North American tribes' reluctance and even refusal to do DNA testing, it makes sense that this part of ancestry would come up as "uncertain."

One of the really cool things with AncestryDNA is it compares your trees with those of your matches, and can tell you surnames you have in common. If it can pinpoint an ancestor in common, it will tell you who they are, and show you the lines of descent to each of you, and what your resulting relationship is. You can then compare that prediction against the prediction based on the percentage of shared DNA. How cool is that? Sadly they won't tell you how much DNA you share, though Ancestry has stated they will be releasing the raw DNA data to its customers sometime next year. Hopefully they'll do it in a way that will allow the data to be used in GedMatch, FTDNA, and other places. So far, I've found two matches that have an ancestor in common! One of them traces back to Lisa's 4th-great-grandfather on her father's side, William Qualls. The other is a closer match, tracing back to Lisa's 2nd-great-grandfather on her mom's side, Thomas Berry Hudson. The Qualls relative would be Lisa's fourth cousin once removed, and the predicted relationship is 4th-6th cousin, so that seems right on the money. The other one would be a second cousin once removed, but the predicted relationship is fourth cousin. A second cousin once removed would normally share about 1.563% of their DNA, while a fourth cousin would share about .195%. That's a pretty big difference, one where having access to the raw data would really come in handy. I need to set aside some time to contact these persons and see if we can't compare notes and figure out exactly how we connect, and what we each have in terms of documentation.

While looking at all of this, I realized something. I've yet to fully document everything in my wife's tree as I received it from her family when we got married (as you know, I've been working the last 18 months just to document my own tree with the stuff I've already collected and I'm still not quite done with that project). But I realized her tree is really different than mine in one major way - I've documented her 16 great-great-grandparents, and every one of them was born in the US. Some of the links to her 3rd-great-grandparents are a little shaky still, but all of 24 that I have documented so far were born in the US as well. Contrast that to my tree, where three of my 2nd-great-grandparents were born in Canada (two of which were children of European immigrants, with the other being a grandchild of immigrants), four were born in Europe, and another three were born in the US but were children of European immigrants. That means that while all of my wife's lines have been in the US since at least her 2nd- or even 3rd-great-grandparents' time, 10 of my 16 lines in the same generation had been in the US only one generation or less. It's fascinating to think of the complex choreography of ancestors making their way to the US at different times, over different routes, probably for vastly different reasons. I am grateful for what DNA and genetic genealogy has taught me about my ancestry so far, and am greatly anticipating what insights and discoveries await!

Treasure Chest Thursday - Gold Rush!

I've finished updating my database with all my Gibson-related files, and have started in on the Groff stuff. My Groff line starts with my third-great-grandmother Mary Groff, wife of Adoniram Ami Shute, and goes back to, well, her father, Paul Groff. I haven't been able to document who Paul's parents are yet, but I do know that he was from New York. While going through my Groff census records, I came across something very interesting today.

My ancestor Mary had a sister named Eldora who was about three years younger than she was, born in Minnesota in July 1860. She married Judson Clark about 1878 and they had four kids - Judson Jr, Susan, Jerome, and Bertha. They moved out to Thurston County, Washington sometime between 1887 and 1898. Her parents, brother George, and sister Ida all moved out there around the same time. Eldora's husband Judson, however, did something that, so far as I know, no one else in my family tree did - he left his family behind for a couple years and went off to join the gold rush. Not the gold rush in California, as he wasn't even born yet when that one started, but one that started about 50 years later in Alaska.

I had found Judson and Eldora in the 1900 census, all listed together Bucoda, Washington. But as I went through my other census records, I realized I had another 1900 census for Judson, but from Alaska, not Washington. At first, I wondered if I had the wrong person, same name but different guy. But aside from the name, the birth date matched - October 1854; both censuses listed Pennsylvania as the birth place; and the Alaska census had a couple of unique columns - one for "date of locating in Alaska," which was March 1898; another column labeled "post office address at home" listed Judson's home address as Tenino, Washington, (which is actually just 4 miles from Bucoda); and another column asked for occupation, not once but twice - at home and in Alaska. The 'at home' occupations listed for the 22 people in the district were pretty varied - farmer (which Judson said he was), sailor, druggist, clerk, salesman, locksmith, and stock raiser among them. But in the column for 'in Alaska', everyone (with one exception) had the exact same occupation - miner. According to Wikipedia, the Klondike gold rush (which was centered some ways to the northeast of where Judson was living in 1900) really picked up between 1896 and 1898, which is when Judson came to Alaska. It all seems to fit together - the personal details all matched, virtually all the residents of the district having 'miner' as their occupation, and the location (generally speaking) and time period matched what I have read about the Klondike gold rush. Given that he was living in Alaska when the census was taken, his wife Eldora (or whoever gave the details given in the census) must have listed him as still living in Washington even though he physically hadn't been in Washington since at least March 1898. He did eventually return to Washington, as I've found him in the 1910, 1920, and 1930 censuses there.

I haven't found anything that shows whether or not he struck it rich up in Alaska. The 1910-1930 censuses just show him and his wife living together alone. But whether he did or not, I'm glad he made it back home to his family. Life in prospecting towns apparently wasn't safe or sanitary, so I'm happy with the fact that he made it home and lived a long life after his gold rush days were over.

Wordless Wednesday - Adoniram Shute and Mary Groff

This is a photo of my third-great-grandparents, Adoniram Shute and his wife, Mary Groff. I don't have a date on it, but given that they were both born in the 1850s, and they look to be somewhere around 30 years old, I would guess this is from around 1885.

Madness Monday - Those crazy Frenchmen (no, seriously)

I've been dabbling in French-Canadian genealogy, researching the Vadnais family. They married into the Harrises when William Vadnais (son of Richard Vadnais and Elinore Bissette) married Charlotte Harris (daughter of Frank Harris and Charlotte Scribner). I wanted to know more about his family, where they came from, and see if I couldn't stretch my research skills about by trying something I've never tried before - researching French-Canadians.

I've looked into this family a little bit previously. I'd found Elinore and her two kids, William and Florence, living in Montana in the 1910 census, and William and his sister in 1920 (she'd married Earl Miller by then). Then I found a marriage record for their mother Elinore to another French-Canadian named Louis Sicard, as well as her death record in 1919. I thought I'd try going into some newspapers and see what they had to say, knowing that they'd given me a lot of insight in other branches of my family. What I found literally blew me away.

I found an article from 1914 about the handling of Richard Vadnais' estate in Alberta, Canada, stating that Richard's brother Polydor Vadnais was named executor of the estate but had quit, leaving the courts to handle it. It also stated that Richard was murdered, but no particulars were known. I did a double- (and probably triple-) take at that - murdered?? Seriously? I immediately jumped into research mode and started digging for all the newspaper articles I could find, and realizing that most of them would be in Canadian newspapers (given that's where the estate and murder took place), I went to Newspaper Archive and started looking.

The longer I looked, the more I found, and the more complicated the story became. I wish I had the time to go into all the particulars, and maybe someday I will, but here's the gist of it:

Richard Vadnais and his wife Elinore (Bissette) Vadnais had some kind of falling out in 1908, which led to Elinore and her brother attacking Richard, with Richard being shot twice. He survived and recovered quickly, though his wife left him for a time. She was prosecuted for the attack but found not guilty, and the couple reunited. Several months later, while at dinner, Richard was shot by an unknown person, lived for a couple weeks, and then died. His wife was accused again, and was again found not guilty. She then moved to Montana, married a man named Louis Sicord, and died in 1919. It sounds like a crazy movie plot, doesn't it?

Some of the articles I read mentioned Elinore's brother but never by name. They also talked about how she came from a big family, and that her brother had a big family of his own, but also didn't name anyone. The only lead I had on her past was her marriage record to Louis, which listed her parents' names Moise Vadnais and Salatique Distraase. I figured the Vadnais name had to be an error, as the newspaper articles were consistent in naming her brother as Bissett or Mr. Bissett. My guess was the person taking the info down asked for her name (Elinore Vadnais) and her father's name (Moise), so the recorder assumed her father's last name was Vadnais. So I tried looking for Moise Bissett, but couldn't find anything that stood out and said "this is the right family." So I put them on hold for a while.

Then last night, while going through my Vadnais records, I tried searching for more newspaper records, playing with the keyword search. I searched for various combinations of Bissett, Vadnais, Richard, and murder, and found several more articles I had missed last time. Two of them proved key in finding Elinore's family. One actually named the brother involved in the first shooting in 1908 - Theodule Bissett. The other mentioned a brother-in-law of Elinore and Theodule's who was involved in the trial, and gave his name as Isaie Daignault, and that he and his wife had nine children. I went looking in the 1911 census and found Isaie and Alphonsine Daignault, living in Alberta with 11 children, of whom 9 were born before August 1908, when the shooting happened. So now I had three siblings to look for - Elinore, Theodule, and Alphonsine Bissett, children of Moise and Salatique.

I hurriedly went to the 1881 census, knowing that Elinore was still single, and figuring Theodule and Alphonsine would be as well. It didn't take me long to find them - Moise and Scholastique Bessette, living in Quebec where they should be. There were a lot more siblings too - Pierre, Henri, Rosanna, Jean Baptiste, and a couple that I can't read yet. I can tell you I did the genealogy happy dance when I found this census - I finally had some concrete info on Elinore's background! Elinore's name was spelled Lionore, so I never would have found her.  Now that I knew who to look for and where, and I went and got the 1871 census as well, and was surprised to find even more siblings - Edmond, Adilde, Joseph, and Delima. This was a large family! I still have to go through these censuses and pull all the details out, and I would really like to look for the 1861 as well. But right now, I'm just happy to have some additional documents on the Bissette side of the Vadnais family, especially since they aren't about a murder or attempted murder.

Wisdom Wednesday - Pay attention to your calendar

I'm finally caught up on entering all my Zitzmann family info! Hooray! Now I'm starting on the Lutheran church parish records from Poland I've found recently from the FHL microfilms I ordered back in July.

I started working on the first one that I could easily tell was connected to my family - a birth record for Michael Joseph, son of Ludwig Heinrich Joseph and Justine Witt, born in 1861 in Kepa Kikolska, Nowy Dwór parish, Warszawa district (county?), Poland. This was an interesting record for several reasons. One, I already had a Michael Joseph born to Ludwig and Justine, but in 1884 in Ulanowka, Ukraine. That Michael immigrated to Canada, where he died in 1905. This new Michael's birth predates that of Gottlieb Joseph, who I thought was Ludwig and Justine's oldest child. I don't know yet what happened to him, if he died young or what. But it seems something must have happened to him, as they reused the name 23 years later, which so far I've only seen in cases where the original name holder had died.

One thing that kind of threw me was the transcription of the birth dates (yes dates - more on that below) I received from a volunteer website was a little bit off. I don't fault them at all - the handwriting is old and hard to read, and I don't know any Polish myself, so I'm in no position to be critical of someone who volunteered time and expertise to help me understand this record. But I was able to take the volunteer's transcription and play around with Google Translate until I came up with what seemed to be the correct transcription of the birth dates, in that it both looked like what was written in the record itself, and Google Translate recognized and was able to translate the words.

The other thing that threw me was the birth record gave two separate birth dates for Michael - August 23rd and September 4th, with no explanation for the apparent discrepancy. I sat there for a while, puzzled as to why it would give two birth dates almost two weeks apart, when it suddenly dawned on me - the calendar change! I remember learning in my genealogy classes at BYU about how many European countries that had been using the Julian calendar changed their calendar system to the Gregorian calendar. The US made its change in 1752, even though the Gregorian calendar was created in the late 1500s. I also remembered hearing that different countries changed their calendars at different times. So I went online and found a calendar converter, and plugged in September 4th for Gregorian, and wouldn't you know it - it came out to be August 23rd in the Julian calendar! I haven't yet looked up which country was in charge of this area of Poland in the 1860s, or when that country changed their calendar, but I feel confident that this is the reason for the dual dates.

While I still have a long ways to go before I can claim to even begin to understand these records and the people that created them, it was a real confidence booster to decipher the dual birth date issue, and to be reasonably sure that I'm correct in my conclusion. I can't wait to see what else these records have to teach me.