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.

Another DNA Surprise

After researching my grandmother's little sliver of African DNA, I thought I would do the same for my grandfather's DNA test. According to 23andMe, grandpa has a little sliver of African DNA on chromosome 6. Using a technique I learned from a member of the DNA Newbie mailing list, I found that this segment is somewhere around 3.1% of the total chromosome.

After the interesting time I had trying to corroborate the African segment in my grandma's DNA on other admixture tools, I wanted to do the same with grandpa's and see what the tools had to say. I should note here that some of the admixture tools found African DNA on other chromosomes (which you'll see in some of the screenshots below), but for this blog post I'm sticking with just the solitary African segment 23andMe found.

First up, Dodecad. The Dodecad tool features three African populations - East African, Northwest African, and Palaeo-African. The graph of this section of chromosome 6 showed both Neo-African and Palaeo-African, with a little dash of Northwest African at the far right of the segment.

And what did the numbers show? That on this chromosome, he is 1% Neo-African, 1.6% Palaeo-African, but no Northwest African interestingly. That makes makes this chromosome about 2.6% African.

So the numbers and graph matched 2 for 3 on this one. Next, let's look at Eurogenes. This tool only has one type of African DNA, labeled West African. Grandpa has a pretty good chunk of it, as you can see here.



The numbers breakdown for Eurogenes said grandpa's chromosome 6 is 2.3% West African. That's pretty close to the 2.6% Dodecad gave me.

So this test shows African DNA in both the graph and numbers. Looking good so far! Now to look at the HarappaWorld admixture tool. HarappaWorld has four African populations - San, East African, Pygmy, and West African. I don't see any San in the graph, but I do see the other three represented. West African shows up the most, followed by East African, with a little bit of Pygmy in between.

When I turn to the numbers, East African doesn't show up at all, yet Pygmy does at .3%. West African dominates at 2.1%, for a total of 2.4% African DNA on this chromosome. That fits in nicely with the 2.3% and 2.6% from the other two. So the graph has three hits, but the numbers only have two. Still, this is looking pretty consistent.

Finally, let's look at MDLP's admixture tool. MDLP has three African populations - Pygmy, South African, and Sub-Saharian. There are little tiny bits of Pygmy DNA a little after the 120M mark, but much more past the 130M mark, so that's a hit. The South African and Sub-Saharian segments are much larger, so grandpa scores positive for all three types of African DNA in this test.

Looking at the numbers for this tool, grandpa has hits in all three populations. On this chromosome, he's got 0.9% Pygmy, 1% South African, and 0.1% Sub-Saharian. That puts his total African DNA on this chromosome at 2.1%, pretty close to the other three. Personally, I think the graph shows Sub-Saharian as the largest of the three, but I think the tool uses different functions or algorithms to print the graph and the numbers breakdown. Either way, the graph shows hits in three African populations, and the numbers match that.



So what does this all boil down to? Between the five DNA analysis tools, all five of them showed African DNA at the same spot on chromosome 6. The graphs on all five tools showed the African DNA, and the percentage breakdowns all verified it as well, though in two cases, populations represented on the graphs did not appear in the numbers. The amount of African DNA varied slightly between tools, with a low of 2.1% and a high of 3.1%. But basically they all told the same story - that my grandpa has a little chunk of DNA that they all believe came from Africa.

So far, that's two different ancestral lines with African DNA in them, both probably very remote, but still there. Amazing to think of the places that little bit of DNA has been, and where it came from originally. I wonder if I still carry it, whether my kids carry it? It'd be a shame for its millenia-long journey to end here. But at least I can let my descendants know it was there.

Wordless Wednesday - Philena Beilstein

This is a photo of my 2nd-great-grandmother, Philena "Lena" Emily Beilstein. I really like this photo because the picture is so clear. This was taken around 1905. It looks like there was another person in the picture but he (I'm guessing it's a he, because the shoulder is taller than Lena, and looks to be a dark-colored suit) was cut out. Lena got married in 1903 to David Briscoe, and in 1907 to Clarence Johnson, so it could possibly have been either of them. Either way, it's a great shot of Lena when she was young, before all the trials and hardships she would later endure.