Counting My (Genealogical) Blessings This Christmas

The presents have been cleared away, the holiday meal and movie enjoyed, and now in the last hours of Christmas day I am coming to terms with the fact that the one thing I had been secretly hoping for—a genealogical breakthrough to tie the paper trail on my paternal line to DNA cousins—isn’t going to materialize in time for this year’s celebration.  Instead of becoming discouraged, as I have so many times in my family history quest, I decided to reflect on all the things I have to be grateful for on this journey.  It has been a remarkable year of discoveries, and when I stop to count my blessings, I feel renewed energy for the next steps in my quest.  Here’s a list of some the genealogical gifts of the past year that I am most grateful for:

1.    

       1.  The story of Julia Linnehan, my maternal great grandmother’s sister, came to me via a newly discovered 3^rd cousin 1x removed, Teresa Vega.  Teresa’s blog, Radiant Roots, Boricua Branches includes a two parter on Julia. Teresa has been my inspiration this year. Her desire to reach out and know the family connected to a painful estrangement made me realize that my insecurity about tracking all of my family lines was silly. Worse, it was blocking the opportunity for re-connection and healing.

      2.  I was able to share with Teresa the discovery of the marriage records for William Linnehan and Ellen Shaunnessy of Buttevant, Cork, Ireland, which helped us learn their father’s names.  William and Ellen are my maternal grandfather’s maternal grandparents.  I also learned the names of his paternal grandparents, Zorach Hirshson and Bertha Harris, who married in Riga, Latvia.

      

      3.  Knowledge of my connection to several descendants of Melugeon families, another gift that came via Teresa.  In learning more about the Melugeons, and another tri-racial group, the Lumbees, I gained important insight into aspects of my paternal ancestry.  There is a large and growing Facebook group, Primos Geneticos, trying to trace our connections with the help of DNA testing.  We’re all becoming gedmatch.com wizards—and this has really opened up my understanding of genetic genealogy, as have the wonderful posts of Roberta Estes on the DNAeXplained-GeneticGenealogy blog.

      4.  My paternal grandfather’s name.  I wrote a post about some of the difficulties in tracking Joseph Cannady in records, but until a wild card search last May (just last names, for all the marriages in Blount County between 1910 and 1920) I had spent untold hours over many years searching in all the wrong places for the wrong name. Now, with the name, and some DNA clues, the search for the needle in the proverbial haystack can at least be narrowed down quite a bit. 

      5.   A new attitude and approach concerning my research.  I had too easily accepted the idea of “brick walls,” until I read the excellent post by Robyn of Reclaiming Kin suggesting that most such walls are artificial.  Her post made me realize that there were many more steps I needed to be taking in my research to address difficult challenges.  They say when the student is ready, the teacher appears, and so it was shortly after reading Robyn’s post that I found myself in the newly formed Facebook group, African American Genealogy and Slave Ancestry Research, with the very stern but loving Principal, Luckie Daniels.  One of AAGSAR's mottoes is " no brick walls permitted".  In the few short months of its existence, AAGSAR has been a huge boon to its members, challenging even long-time and savvy family historians to bump up their research and technology skills and to take their knowledge of African American genealogy mainstream.  For relative newbies like myself, it has meant getting out of my comfort zone to take my research to a new level.  I am just one of dozens who have begun to document my research online in blogs.  We’ll have a major roll out of new blogs for our January 5^th, 2014 Blogfest (see Diane Haddad’s write-up on Family Tree magazine’ s genealogyinsider here).

      So all in all, I’d say it’s been a good year for gifts.  And now I have the tools, and the communities, to help go after that other gift I was looking for.  That’s my spring 2014 challenge: to connect the dots between DNA and the paper trail.  What’s yours?

Cousins, Community, and So-Called Coincidences

I got a kick out of the post, Everybody cousin, on the Gardener’s Footprint blog, because it described something I believe is true—anywhere you look, anybody could be your cousin.  Perhaps a distant cousin, but a cousin nevertheless.  In fact, my cousin Maurice joked that people are going to have to add DNA tests to their prenup agreements to make sure their future spouse is a distant enough cousin to make it okay to be kissin’ cousins.  (He didn’t say that exactly, but you get my drift). 

Once you take a DNA test, you begin to realize just how many people are cousins. I have almost 1000 cousins in my “Extended DNA Family” on 23andme.com.

My 23andme.com relative list

And these cousins are literally everywhere, from South Africa to South America to South Carolina.    Well, I don’t have any cousins that I know of in South Dakota, but that may just be because they haven’t tested yet. 

One thing I have cherished in my genealogy journey is getting to know some of my DNA cousins through Facebook.  Even though many of us are pretty distant cousins, and others are actually cousins of cousins, we have joined together to form a community, Primos Geneticos (Cousins Genetic).  Just like the AAGSAR community (which, of course, includes many cousins and cousins of cousins), we support one another, pray for one another, share stories both funny and sad, laugh at each other’s jokes, and importantly, help each other in the never-ending quest to trace our family histories.   

As we trace our histories together in these virtual communities, we have discovered many so-called coincidences.  For example, Andrea, one of the AAGSAR family, writes a post about her Shinault family and happens to mention someone named Gamble who traveled with the family from Virginia to New York. I commented that my godfather's Gamble line has links to Virginia.  Later, when I post about Charles Henry Gamble, who was born in Norfolk, Andrea is sure there is a connection.  I can’t wait to see if we can trace it.  When another member of AAGSAR, Xzanthia, helped me to search for military records for Charles Henry, it led to the discovery that he had ties to her hometown, Chattanooga. (According to gedmatch.com,  Xzanthia and I are—you guessed it—distant cousins).   

My cousin Maurice, mentioned above, figures that our family links originate in South Carolina, and gedmatch.com indicates the connection may be as long ago as 7 generations back.  But I have closer DNA cousins with links to the Gaddy's of Wadesboro, North Carolina, where Maurice’s great grandmother was born (read all about her in his two-part post).  So our relatives were neighbors in one state not so very long ago while kin in another in the more distant past.   Speaking of neighbors, the wildest so-called coincidence is one I share with my cousin, Teresa.  So far, she’s the only DNA cousin that I have a paper trail connection to as well.  But in turns out we have another connection:  we lived in the very same building in New York City though at different times.  Not just in the same small town, like my relatives and Maurice’s; not in the same neighborhood.  But in the same building, on the same floor! In a city as big as New York, how could that be?  Please, don’t tell me it’s just a coincidence.

I don’t believe in coincidences.  I have no doubt that just as our ancestors moved in circles with one another, finding strength in community, so too are they bringing us together to do this work of telling their stories.  They leave little signposts to help us find one another, and in doing so, help us to find them.