Genes Day Friday - Finding my French relatives

Photo couresty of www.as-found.net

Now that I've confirmed my French ancestry from William Vadnais and built a pretty good pedigree
for him, I've gone back to some of my grandma's 23andMe matches to see how many I can identify as coming from her French side. Turns out, there's quite a few!

The closest relative is obviously the cousin whose test helped me confirm the Vadnais connection. Their common ancestor is my grandma's bio-dad, so even though it doesn't pinpoint an ancestor very far back in terms of generations, it gives me several hundred cM worth of verified Vadnais/Bessette DNA, so anyone who matches my grandma and my cousin on those segments is tied to my Vadnais/Bessette line, which will come in very handy in identifying common ancestors.

Then there's the cousin whose Vadnais ancestor in his pedigree on Gedmatch helped me begin figuring all this out. He's a bit more distant, a descendant of my 4th-great-grandparents Louis Vadnais and Josephett Fregeau dit Laplanche. Finding common matches to him and his mom, who have both tested and share the same size segment with my grandma, will be tougher since they only share one small segment of about 10 cM. But I won't forget how his pedigree helped me solve this mystery.

There's a match on the Bessette side that has multiple connections to Antoine Bessette, my 5th-great-grandfather. That's pretty far back, but because of the multiple lines of descent, she and my grandma have almost 50 cM of DNA in common.

Finally, in the last couple weeks I've found two more Bessette side relatives. One contacted me because of the French surnames listed in my profile, and the other I contacted because she matched my other Bessette relative. In both cases, we were able to determine our common ancestors in just a couple of emails. It was awesome!  Both of these cousins have Moise Bessette and Scholastique Dextraze, my 3rd-great-grandparents, as common ancestors with my grandma.

I still need to download the chromosome mapping tool Kitty Munson created for us on the DNA Newbie mailing list. Now that I have a whole bunch of identified segments, I can't wait to see what her mapped chromosome looks like.

Plus I found out today that Family Tree DNA has upgraded their Family Finder match sorting to allow you to tag someone, and sort your matches to include only those people that also match that person. That is a HUGE upgrade to having to email them individually like you used to have to, or compare them 2 and 3 at a time like 23andMe still does. This could really help in finding more Vadnais/Bessette relatives, as well as with my grandpa's test (the only other one I've moved to FTDNA so far).

All in all, a very exciting week for this genetic genealogist. And many more good things to come, I'd wager!

Genes Day Friday - Heritage Lost, Heritage Found part 2

Once I realized that James Harris was not my biological great-grandfather, I wanted to know if I could find out who my biological great-grandfather was. At this point, all I had to go on were my grandma's results at 23andMe.com, and her matches at GedMatch.com.

I tried contacting some of my grandma's closest matches at 23andMe, but I didn't have a lot of success there. Most of her matches didn't respond to my information sharing requests, and the ones that did were too distant of relatives to help me answer the question I wanted answered; I had no hope of identifying a connection to an estimated 4th cousin if I had no names for half of my grandma's family tree. So I turned instead of GedMatch. I am now VERY glad I did.

Back then, Gedmatch allowed you to upload gedcom files, so you could display a family tree of the test taker's ancestors (this feature has been disabled for some time, and as of August 2013 is still not restored). As with 23andMe, I started emailing her closest matches, but I also went through their pedigrees if they had them, and searched for any surnames that looked familiar. Before long, I found one - a match that had a grandmother surnamed Vadnais. This immediately caught my attention. If you've read my blog, you know about my Vadnais connection - James Harris' sister Charlotte married William Vadnais, son of Richard and Eleanor (Bessette) Vadnais. Was this match related to my Vadnais relatives? Could grandma's bio-dad be a relative of the same Vadnais family?

I emailed the match, and he shared his family tree on Ancestry. After some digging, I discovered he was indeed related to William Vadnais. The connection was pretty distant, 3rd cousin twice removed from my grandma's Vadnais cousin of her same generation, but it was there. Of course, I had to admit to myself that grandma could have been related to anyone on his tree. Fortunately, he'd also tested his mother (who had the Vadnais connection), and grandma matched his mom as well. So at least I knew which side of his tree we matched on.

At this point, I decided I needed to broaden my pool of potential matches. I wanted to see if FamilyTreeDNA had clients more responsive to emails from other genealogists, and I wanted to see if their bio-geographic analysis (BGA) tools matched what 23andMe said about grandma's ethnic ancestry. So I transferred her results to FTDNA.

Two things stood out right away - one, that they also declared her of 100% European descent, with no Indian or African heritage. Two, she had a LOT of matches with declared French-Canadian ancestry. That was a huge surprise. It also gave another indication that my grandma's bio-dad was a Vadnais relative, or at least a French-Canadian. Once again, I set about contacting matches and trying to determine common ancestors. During this process, I found a match that had a documented connection to Eleanor Bessette. To me, this was a huge deal - not only did my grandma have a Vadnais descendant match, she now had a Bessette descendant match. In my research on my Vadnais family, I found two Vadnaises that married Bessettes - Richard Vadnais, and his brother, Polydore Vadnais, who married Rosanna Bessette, Eleanor's sister. Polydore had two daughters, no sons, so his line was obviously not mine. But Richard did have a son - William. Could William Vadnais be my grandma's bio-dad?

Rosanna Bessette and Polydore Vadnais,
Courtesy of Marlene Rimmer

To find out, I asked a cousin of mine, a descendant of William Vadnais, to take a DNA test, and gratefully, she consented. The weeks seemed to crawl by, but when the results came in, they were conclusive. She matched my grandma for just the right amount of DNA for their suspected relationship. After working on the problem for over a year, it took a little while for it to sink in that I had finally found my grandma's biological father, William Vadnais.

It has now been a few weeks since that discovery, and I find I am still trying to sort out my feelings on it. I know that William Vadnais is my great-grandfather, but I don't feel connected to him the same way I do to my other ancestors. My wife says it's because I don't have a lifetime of associating him with my family the way I do with Augusta Joseph, Katherine Hammer, or my other great-grandparents, and I think she's right. On the other hand, my connection to the Harris family has changed as well. I've been working on researching them since the start of my genealogy career. When I had to write a genealogy research paper in college, I chose the Harrises. I've written about them a couple times here on the blog. For a short time, after I realized I was not biologically related to the Harrises, I almost wanted to just clip the Harrises off my family tree. But I realized that they are still family. Jim Harris put his name on my grandma's birth certificate, he raised her as his daughter. He wasn't a perfect father, but who is? Whether they were close or distant, biological or adopted, he's still family. I think I'm still adjusting, trying to figure out how to have two different families occupy the same branch on my family tree. But I'm getting there.

Genes Day Friday - Heritage Lost, Heritage Found

It's been a long time since my last Genes Day update, but I've got a lot to show for it. First up, new test results! A Joseph cousin of mine agreed to test, as long as I would help interpret the results and assist with finding and connecting with new relatives. Talk about an offer I can't refuse! One of the first things I checked out was his Y-DNA results, as I was eager to find out what haplogroup my Joseph male ancestors belonged to. It turns out, my Joseph line belongs to haplogroup N1C1*, or M178 (the terminal SNP). I conferred with members of the DNA Newbie mailing list I'm on, as well as checking ISOGG's website, and it appears that, for now at least, there are no SNPs downstream from M178, so that's as detailed as I can get at this time. National Geographic's Geno 2.0 test might shed some more light, but for now, I know enough to make me happy.

According to 23andMe, this haplogroup is most highly concentrated in Siberians, Finns, Estonians, and the Saami people of Scandinavia. Obviously, this could just be the LONG range ancestry of my Joseph line, but I can't help but wonder if it holds any meaning for my research in a genealogical time frame. I've traced my Joseph line back to Christian Joseph, born about 1815 in Poland. Were his ancestors Russian or Scandinavian? Once I find someone willing to transcribe and translate Polish records for me, I'll get back on the research for that line and see what I can find.

Also, I heard back from one of my mom's closest matches, and we were able to determine our common ancestors! It turns out we're double cousins, as her great-grandparents, Henry Hammer and Mary McDonald, were siblings of my mom's great-grandparents, Thomas Hammer and Katherine McDonald. This is exciting because I'm starting to work on chromosome mapping, mapping out which ancestor or ancestral couple each part of DNA comes from. I've started this on the tests taken by my three grandparents, my mom, and a couple of the cousins who've tested for me. It's tricky, and not a little complicated, but I'm really interested in this - this is one of the big things I'd hoped to be able to do when I started doing genetic genealogy. Maybe I'll do two separate versions, one with the names of the ancestors, and one with locations of where those ancestors lived. We'll see.

That's some heritage found. Now for what I lost. I've written previously (here , here, and here) about my difficulty in figuring out why my grandma's DNA test showed no Native American DNA. I now have the answer, and it's not at all what I was expecting.

To help figure out why my grandma was showing no Native American DNA, I tested a child of one of her siblings. The results came back - this relative also had no Native American DNA, but also showed only half as much DNA in common with my grandma as they should for their predicted relationship. There had been a longstanding story that this sibling of my grandma's had a different father than my grandma did, and the DNA test results confirmed that. Unfortunately, neither my grandma nor her relative showed any Native DNA. I started to wonder whether the "Indian" ancestor was really Indian after all. Her name was Lisette Rainier, a French name, and part of me wondered if she weren't simply considered and treated Indian, while not actually being of Indian descent.

To test this theory, I tested two of my grandma's paternal cousins, both descendants of Tom Harris and his wife Lisette. They came back sharing just the right amount of common DNA, confirming their relationship to each other. They also showed Indian DNA, each having the correct percentages of Indian DNA for having a full-blooded Indian ancestor at the same generation as Lisette. But the real surprise - they had no DNA in common with my grandma or her sibling's child. None. I thought about this for a while, trying to figure out how these two relatives, whose descent from Tom and Lisette I had documented carefully, who shared the right amount of DNA with each other, and both had Indian DNA, could both come up as unrelated to both my grandma and her sibling's child. Then it hit me - neither my grandma nor her sibling were children of my great-grandma's husband. I later confirmed this when I was contacted by another Tom and Lisette Harris descendant who had tested at 23andMe. He matched his two cousins for just the right amount of DNA and also had the right percentage of Indian DNA, and still had no DNA in common with my grandma or her sibling's child.

This was very unexpected, to say the least. I never imagined finding anything like this, not in a million years. I had my grandma take this DNA test originally to help find out more about our Indian ancestry. I felt like I'd stolen something from my grandmother; she'd always taken such pride in her Indian heritage, had worked for years to find all she could about Lisette, and now I had to tell her that we aren't actually Lisette's descendants. Not only that, but now we knew that the man who helped raise her was not her biological father. She took the news very admirably, and agreed to help me in trying to find out who her biological father was.

I don't have any negative feelings towards my great-grandma about this, and neither do my mom and grandma from what they've told me. I know my great-grandma loved her family, loved her kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids as much as she could. Whatever happened, that much stood out about her above all else. No information I found on who the biological fathers of her children were can or will ever change that.

Stay tuned for part 2, where I document how I found the identity of my grandma's biological father.

Wordless Wednesday - Gibson photo pedigree chart

This is a photo pedigree chart of my grandpa Fred Gibson's direct ancestors. I wish I had pictures of more of them, but I am grateful for the pictures I do have. Photos of Fred, Fred Sr, Augusta, and Samuel are courtesy of Fred Gibson. Ludwig and Justine's photos are courtesy of Jim Joseph. And John Gibson's photo is from the Montana Historical Society in Helena.

Wordless Wednesday - July 1967

This is a photo of what looks like just a family lunch on a sunny July day in 1967. Not sure if it's for the 4th of July, or just an ordinary day. Either way, it's a good photo. Those in the photo are, left to right:

unknown, Charles Wagner holding unknown baby, Roseanne Gibson, Eileen Pushard, Kathy Gibson (sitting in front of Eileen), Fred Gibson, Blossom Gibson, Rosie Wagner, Tommy Pushard.

The last days of Eleanor Bessette - part 2

As I mentioned last time, the documents that my French-Canadian research friend sent me added a LOT to my understanding of the Vadnais and Bessette families in my family tree. But they also fundamentally changed my perspective on Eleanor Bessette in particular, showing that her life was much more complicated than I'd at first imagined. The last document that pertained to Eleanor from my friend's research proved to me that the last nine years of Eleanor's life were about as turbulent as the rest of her life had been. This was another marriage record - the fourth in Eleanor's life, also from Butte, Montana but dated 1915. It was the name of the groom that threw me - Louis Sicord.

At first I thought it was the same person, that she'd just divorced and remarried him. But then I noted some important differences between the 1910 and 1915 marriages - Eleanor was listed as 43 years old in both; the 1910 Louis was 38, while 1915 Louis was 54; and 1910 Louis gave his mother's name as Cecelia Gabous, while 1915 Louis said his mother was Lena (no maiden name given). That got me thinking - could she have married two men with the same (or similar) name? This really interested me, and I knew of a way that might help solve the riddle - city directories.

Ancestry.com has a pretty healthy stack of Butte, Montana city directories online - 1884 (the first 15 pages only), 1890, 1893 (first 15 pages again), 1896, 1898-1900, 1904-1918, 1923, and many more. I went digging into these directories, and pretty soon I had a whole stack of references to Louis, Eleanor, and other Vadnais family members. Here's what I found.

Louis Sicord first appears in the 1910 directory, rooming at 27 W Quartz in Butte. This happens to be the address where Henry Vadnais, Lewis Vadnais, and Olivian Vadnais (relatives of Eleanor's late husband Richard) were living. It almost makes me wonder if that's how he and Eleanor met. Eleanor was living at 508 E Galena. The addresses are only a few blocks apart, as seen on Google Earth.

 

The next year, 1911, Louis and Eleanor were living together at 502 E Galena, just a house or two away from where she lived the year before. The 1912 entry is a little confusing. There's no listing for Eleanor, and Louis' entry just says "moved to Nome Alaska". I'm not sure if Louis and Eleanor both went up, or just Louis. My instinct is that Louis went alone, but I don't know either way. The 1913 directory lists a Lewis and Lourie Sicord living at 508 W Park, which at first glance I thought might be a different family. But then I saw that Florence Vadnais, Eleanor's daughter, was also listed at the same address. That convinced me that Louis and Eleanor were back in Butte. Meanwhile, Richard's brother, Polydor Vadnais, lived near them at 201 S Washington. Polydor had been listed at that address every year since 1908. 

 

 

1914 saw only one change - Polydor moved to 243 E Park, the same address as the livery where he worked the year before. The address was also listed as Vadnais Block. I believe, given that seven other people listed this 243 E Park as their address, as well as a bookkeeper who said he lived at Vadnais Block, that Polydor was running a boarding house at this address. So for Louis, Eleanor, and their relatives, nothing too crazy had happened (with the possible exception of an excursion to Alaska in 1912).

 

Things changed for everyone in 1915. Florence and Eleanor moved to 1854 Harrison, quite a distance from their previous address. Louis, on the other hand, had moved to Vadnais Block, 243 E Park. And Polydor had moved northeast to 272 Pennsylvania, while Polydor's wife Rose was listed at their 201 S Washington address.

 

 

 

I think, given this shift in everyone's addresses, along with the second marriage record for Louis and Eleanor in September, 1915, that the cause (or at least a major cause) for all these changes was a divorce between Louis and Eleanor. Eleanor had a pretty rough marital history - a marriage to and divorce from Albert Lafond, a turbulent marriage to Richard with multiple separations, not to mention being arrested for Richard's murder. So for her and Louis to divorce and move to separate addresses fits the pattern pretty well. It's interesting the Polydor was also displaced by this, seemingly to make room for Louis. But whatever caused them to split was overcome, as they did remarry.

 

After that, things quieted down for Louis and Eleanor. Louis joined Eleanor at the Harrison residence in 1916, and stayed there through at least 1918 (the last year Ancestry has directories for until 1923). Sadly, Polydor died December 14, 1915, and his wife Rose stayed at the 201 S Washington address through 1918 at least. Vadnais Block was listed in 1916 and 1917, so it seems Rose continued running the boarding house at least that long. It wasn't listed in 1918, so I don't know if she kept it going after that. Eleanor died 7 August 1919, and as her name was given in the death record as Eleanor Sicord, it seems likely that she didn't divorce Louis again. I don't have a death record for Louis yet, and haven't found any further marriage records for him, so I don't know what became of him after this. I still need to see if I can find any more directories for him.

 

But for now, I'm satisfied that the Louis who married Eleanor in 1910 is the same one that married her in 1915, even with the age and mother's name differences. The directories show a consistent story, and marriage records have been known to be incorrect on personal details. I also now have a much more detailed picture of the life of Eleanor Bessette after Richard Vadnais' death. She led a very mobile, interesting, and in many ways tragic life. I hope she died relatively happy with how things turned out.

 

Update: One thing I forgot to mention - Polydor Vadnais's wife was Rose Bessette, sister of Eleanor Bessette. That may have been part of what drew her to Montana after Richard died.  



The last days of Eleanor Bessette - part 1

I've spent the last couple weeks going through some Vadnais family documents that were sent to me by a friend of mine in the Quebec research community on Facebook, who excels at French-Canadian research. If you haven't checked out the FamilySearch communities on Facebook, here's a list of them. They have over 100, and they are super helpful, and full of knowledgeable people. Anyways, I've been going through these documents - baptisms, marriages, burials, census records, and others - and putting together this family's history. Very fascinating to see how long this family has been in Quebec, and mind-boggling to think of how many people alive today are descended from these ancestors.

One of the most interesting people in these documents has been someone I've written about before - Eleanor Bessette, wife of Richard Vadnais. I thought the surname was Bissette (that's how it was written in the Alberta newspapers) but I've since found out it was actually Bessette, or sometimes Besset. Anyways, Eleanor (born Marie Eleanor) was the eighth of 15 children (!) of Moise Bessette and Scholastique Dextraze. The documents from my friend revealed she was born on 24 November 1863 in Mont Saint Gregoire, Quebec, and baptized there the next day. Ok, nothing earth-shattering there. But that's where the normalcy ends. The next record in Eleanor's life is a marriage record - but not to Richard Vadnais. Turns out she had a previous marriage to a man named Albert Aldric Lafond in 1882, when she was 18 and he was 20. (Interesting side note - Albert Lafond's mother's maiden name was Picard! How cool is that?) The crazy thing is, they got married in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, over 300 miles from the suburb of Montreal where she was born. They were both from Quebec, so I have no idea why they felt they had to travel so far to get married. I don't know Massachusetts records well, so I haven't started looking to see whether they stayed, or just stopped there to get married.

So far as I know, they didn't have any children, and they were only married for a maximum of eight years, as evidenced by the next record - Eleanor's marriage to Richard in 1890. This record was another surprise. The date was earlier than I'd suspected, since Eleanor and Richard's first child, Florence was born in 1897. But the real surprise was the location - Butte, Montana! Once again, Eleanor seems to have traveled an extensive distance for a marriage. I don't know how she and Richard met, as Richard was living in Butte at the time, and I don't know whether Eleanor stayed in Massachusetts or went back to Quebec with Albert before divorcing him. Either way, when she married Richard she said she was divorced. There's no listing for either Richard or Eleanor in the 1896 Butte directory, so I'm guessing they'd moved up to Alberta, where their two children were born in 1897 and 1902. That's a trip of over 300 miles, not a quick journey in those days.

Thanks to the fireworks between Eleanor and Richard (and the resulting newspaper articles), I think I have a pretty good idea of what happened between them until Richard's death in 1909. After he died, Eleanor moved to Butte, where various members of Richard's family (and possibly hers - there's an Alfonso Bessette listed there in 1910) were living. As I'd mentioned in a previous post, I found a marriage record for Eleanor to a Louis Sicord from October 1910, so she wasn't widowed very long before she remarried. I'd also previously found a death record on Ancestry.com for Eleanor Sicord, giving her death date as 7 August 1919. I assumed she'd settled down with Louis, lived a quiet life with him for the last nine years of her life, and then passed away. Turns out, I was quite wrong. Stay tuned for part two!