Remembering Those Who Came Before

 Memorial Day is traditionally for honoring deceased relatives and loved ones who served in the armed forces. Other cultures have a similar holiday, although with a broader aim of venerating ancestors, not only veterans. We as Americans have a peculiar focus on this specific national service, such that we have multiple holidays that commemorate soldiers, seamen, and airmen.

The first national Memorial Day was designated in 1868, in which Union and Confederate soldiers' graves were decorated in Arlington National Cemetery. Prior to this, local towns had their own ceremonies where graves were decorated with flowers and losses remembered. Remarkably, perhaps the very first of such "decoration days" was held by emancipated black citizens in Charleston, South Carolina, mere days after the conclusion of the Civil War.

I would like to note that we don't choose our ancestors. It is comforting and happy to memorialize our forefathers who served on the "right side" of various conflicts. As it happens, I only have one ancestor that I have confirmed to have served in the Civil War--as a Confederate soldier. My wife has several Union soldiers in her family tree, and perhaps even one Confederate (he was from Missouri so it was complicated). As fraught as that may seem, I have a relative who has ancestors from Germany in the early 20th century--foreign enemies of America in a couple of conflicts that are somewhat well known.

My point in all this is that Memorial Day need not be exclusively a day to "celebrate" the sacrifices of those who have come before. They should, at the very least, be remembered. We are not well served by history if we fail to recognize it, warts and all. We don't need to espouse the same views and perspectives that our forefathers held, just as we need not be beholden to beliefs and politics that we held even 5 years before. We would be doing ourselves a great disservice, however, if we did not remember where we came from.

I'll close with one recent discovery I made for my wife's 4th great grandfather, William R Owens. As best as I could tell, he was from Pennsylvania, born sometime around 1816, and then died sometime after 1860 after having 8 children in Ohio. The census listed him as "M.D." in 1860, but a farmer in 1850. That little nugget intrigued me, but I couldn't find any additional information about this man who seemed to be a doctor, until I went digging around in a history book for Warren County, Ohio. I had done some research on his children, doing my best to find where they ended up, which ended up providing the crucial link. His daughter married a prominent man in Warren County, and the local historian detailed a few items about their lives and their heritage, which included the heretofore little-known William Owens. As it turned out, he enlisted with the Union army to use his skills as a doctor. He ended up in the fortifications outside of Corinth, MS. At the strategic rail crossing there, the two sides vied for control. William Owens presumably served in one of the army hospitals hastily constructed in advance of the siege, where it appears he succumbed to some sort of disease. He was buried not far from the town of Corinth.

From http://www.americacivilwar.org/siege-of-corinth

It's sometimes not pleasant to recover the lost fragments of the past, but the more we understand, the better we know how to move forward. Sometimes we find causes to celebrate. Sometimes we find shame. Ultimately, however, I believe we are enriched by a closer knowledge of the truth of our own history, holding within ourselves sometimes contradictory ideas. Isn't that, after all, what makes us human?

Things I'm Working On

A happy new year to all! I'm looking forward to seeing what interesting DNA matches pop up after the winter sales. Since DNA tests were such a hot ticket item over the holidays, naturally, some low-effort articles popped up online this month. I'll take a brief moment to discuss one story.

The host of the Canadian Broadcasting Company program Marketplace has an identical twin sister. The two decided last year to try out all of the main DNA testing companies (Ancestry, MyHeritage, 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA, and Living DNA) and compare their results. The newsworthy aspect of this story is that the ethnicity reports from the two sisters varied somewhat from one another, and, of course, the different companies did not agree completely with one another.

Of itself, the story was mildly interesting. Then other places got into it, with headlines like "Sorry, but those DNA tests you took are mostly bull@!$%." Ugh. It stems from my biggest complaint about casual DNA testers--people test and want to see the pretty breakdown of their ethnicity, and that's about it. So, I can understand that if people learn that their pretty graphs are subject to algorithm and sample quality, they may get upset that their results do not report 25% Irish ethnicity "like they're supposed to be." I'm grateful that these pretty graphs entice so many to perform the test, but I wish the DNA companies would make some more effort in linking autosomal DNA testing to family history. "Hey look I'm 90% Welsh" is a bit fun, but even better is "Hey look I'm 90% Welsh and my 3rd great grandfather fought in the Crimean War" (George James...details I may never be able to verify without a visit to the War Offices in the UK).

TL;DR: DNA tests are not bullcrap. They are powerful genealogical tools you can use to learn more about your direct heritage. In some cases, the only tool that gets you past a "brick wall."

For example! I dabble in my wife's family history from time to time. She has a couple of hardcore genealogist relatives, so I did not feel an urgent need to work it out. Her father's line goes out to old Ohio, with Sniders and Spruances. German sounding names, but the records don't go back to Germany yet. A few months ago I tossed out a request to the Custer County Historical Society in Nebraska to locate obituaries for George Mahlon Snider and Eva Celesta Spruance. They had published an obituary index, but I wanted the actual newspaper articles.

They suddenly got back to me this month. I had completely forgotten. They asked for $12 to reimburse their scanning and microfilm time. I didn't realize there was a fee when I had asked, but I was more than happy to pay it given the value of the information provided.

The big unknown for me was her immediate family. She married George Snider in Marshall, Ohio, but they moved off to Nebraska shortly after that. I could never find her in any censuses prior to her marriage. Knowing that she had two half-brothers helped me focus on them. I started reexamining all the previously saved data on Eva Spruance, when I found that one of her children listed her maiden name as VanZant, rather than Spruance. That was different!

Quickly, I was able to locate the VanZants of Marshall, Ohio in census returns. Sure enough, Eva was among them. In fact, the 1860 census listed her...with the surname Thurman! The Custer County society also gave me a family group sheet--it's unclear to me whether they had filled it out or if they got it from their records. It listed a Phoebe as her mother's name, which I couldn't verify until I saw the census.

My best theory at this point was that she was from either a previous marriage or she was illegitimate. No records exist to indicate this fact. But, my wife did take a DNA test. Turns out that she matches a descendant of Phoebe's father (a Spruance), confirming that Eva is Phoebe's daughter. And, she did have some matches with Thurmans who lived in the Highland county area of Ohio in the 1800s. I'm not sure yet how I'll identify who it was without either more DNA matches or a magical tell-all document, but a fascinating turn nonetheless.

Back on my family's side, I was sifting through my DNA matches when I found a couple of Danks. I had a quick lol, given the current usage of the word. What was more interesting to me was that they had relatively few matches on my father's side, except with my tree going back to my 2nd great grandmother, Matilda Russell. I had been trying to figure out what happened to all the Abters and Russells as of late, so this got me more interested.

Fortunately, these matches actually had trees, and I traced one back to Michigan. I wasn't expecting to find a common ancestor there, since none of my direct ancestors lived there, to my knowledge. However, this gem was shared on her Ancestry page.

She was a Russell. They appeared to have stopped in Pennsylvania after moving from Scotland. This much I knew from my 2nd great grandmother Matilda Russell, as she was born in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Her father, Robert Russell, moved to McFarland County, Kansas, by 1870, so I never focused much effort on Pennsylvania.

The fact that really caught my attention was the note about her membership as a Latter-day Saint. To my knowledge, the Russell family was not part of the "Mormon" movement (unlike many of my other ancestors). The first possibility that popped into my head was that the family converted while in Scotland. It seemed inconsistent with other faithful members, however, that they would have not settled in Utah. The patriarch, James Russell, is said to have died in 1849 in Scotland. I know very little about him--neither his life nor his death. He wasn't very old when he passed away, too. Unfortunately, civil registration of deaths in Scotland didn't start until 1855, so sketchy parish records are all I have to go on, and if he was a member of a nonconformist church, bets are off.

My first theory is that the family converted to the church, James Russell met an untimely end, and without means of support, the family set out to America to earn money. Perhaps they couldn't afford passage all the way to Utah, which is why they stayed in Pennsylvania, where the sons began working in the coal mines there.

But, after doing more research, a second theory began to develop. Perhaps they had no contact with the Church in Scotland, and the family came over to Pennsylvania simply to settle. An offshoot of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Sidney Rigdon's group) flourished in southwestern Pennsylvania. Perhaps the Scottish immigrant Russell family adopted this local religion as a means of support?

As of yet, I don't have enough information to decide either way. But there appears to be interesting stories lurking in the background of my family without my realizing!

Remembering the Great War

I only had one direct ancestor who served in World War I, by virtue of draft selection and/or age. I had many more uncles and cousins who served, some for the United Kingdom, but the majority for the United States.

Frank Kendall James, Sr. - 2nd LT, 9th Infantry

My great grandfather, Frank Kendall James, had a much different upbringing than I had previously thought. His mother, Jennie Williams James, died from complications of his childbirth (26 Oct 1894, 4 days after Frank's birth), leaving his father, John James, in a state of distress. John had four other young children to care after and was stretched thin, being a recent immigrant to Utah.

The circumstances of the arrangement aren't known to me, but Frank was placed in the care of Joseph Lee Kendall and Hannah Rose Lee Sackrighter Kendall. The two were Methodist ministers and friends of John James. He was raised by the ministers, alongside a foster brother, Olney, as their own. He took on their last name for most of his youth. By 1900, we find the Kendalls in Bowen, Nebraska. By 1910, the itinerant ministers had moved to Tacoma, Washington, where Frank attended high school. He enrolled in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (apparently with some study of German literature) in the early 19...teens?

Hostilities in Europe escalated, and American sentiment turned against Germany and its allies with the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. The Zimmermann Telegram was the proverbial nail in the coffin, and the United States declared war on Germany in April of 1917. President Wilson knew that the comparatively small US force would need to be significantly bolstered in order to have effect on the outcome of the war. Conscription was required to achieve this, and Frank was drafted in Nebraska in August of 1917. Frank knew of his adopted status, at least by this point, as he used his father's surname in his records.

He attended officers' training camp at Camp Funston, Kansas, receiving his commission as 2nd lieutenant in early 1918. When he departed for France (18 Jul 1918) onboard the captured vessel Princess Matoika, he was attached to a machine gun company in the 9th infantry. He apparently corresponded with his birth father, John, as one of his letters was shared, at least in part, in the Salt Lake Tribune, 25 Oct 1918.

It seems that he was rather sanguine in his involvement. Perhaps it was but a false front...I haven't located precise details on his engagements and movements during the Great War. My studies of the conflict have led me to the conclusion that the constant barrage of artillery and machine gun fire, in addition to chemical warfare made the trenches seem about as hellish as any place on earth could ever be. I don't think the world has ever since seen such terrible fighting in such a limited area for such a long period of time.

My great grandfather's letter aside, he returned home, uninjured, and resumed civilian life. Home, as it turned out, appeared to be Utah, a place Frank had not lived in since infancy. I'm not sure how he was welcomed home by his father John, but I assume that the prestige of his son's service helped motivate him to at least put on a good show of fatherly affection. Shortly after his resettlement in Utah, he married Clarice Rachel Romney, of serious Mormon stock. Despite this, Frank remained a Methodist throughout his life. He worked as an accountant for US Smelting and Mining his whole adult life. He maintained contact with his foster brother, the Reverend Olney Lee Kendall. To Frank and Clarice was born only one son who survived infancy (there were two other children who were either stillborn or died very early on), my grandfather Frank Kendall James, Jr. Frank Sr died of a heart ailment 11 Feb 1964.

It's amazing to think that it's been 100 years since the armistice was signed ending hostilities in Europe. America's involvement in the conflict was brief in comparison to other nations, but no doubt every bit as shockingly brutal. As many more people were involved, nations quickly learned there is little glory to be found on a battlefield cratered by thousands of artillery rounds, the air acrid with smoke. War had become a rather impersonal affair, with killing carried out by machines often beyond visual range. And although deemed to be "the war to end all wars," it wasn't.

My great grandfather risked his life fighting for allies, when his own homeland wasn't under serious challenge. I have cousins for whom this conflict represented an existential threat. This day I honor their sacrifices to keep the world free from domination by one power or another. This day I pray that we need not ever have to kill so many in order to maintain this freedom.

Inaugural Post

Welcome, everyone. Well, honestly, I don't anticipate getting a lot of traffic here, but maybe, someday, someone, who's throwing a hail-mary Google search may find this little blog useful.

First note: I'm no web developer. I'm really just going to focus on content and the design/layout of this blog will probably remain, like...basic.

I've been wanting to do something like this for some time, but I just haven't really had a strong or compelling plan put together in my head. Honestly, I still don't, but I've encountered enough surprises and, frankly, miracles, in my genealogical research that I've decided to just go ahead regardless.

Yes, that's the topic: genealogy. Family history. Ancestry. Whatever you want to call it, it's the practice of finding your ancestors and relatives and any information related to them. As a devout member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon...but using that term is now contrary to the wishes of President Russell M Nelson), I've always been aware of the work that my family has put forth over the years, but I never really personally engaged. My earliest memory was transcribing typewritten data into Personal Ancestral File (PAF), especially about strange places like Moravia or Bohemia. Last year around Thanksgiving, my mother's brother, pulled out pictures and files about my 2nd and 3rd great grandfathers. For whatever reason, suddenly, it all clicked into place for me. I wanted to know their stories, who they were, and where they came from, because it all has some small bearing on me.

That's when I got started, personally. I fired up Familysearch.org, then found that as an active member, I also have an Ancestry.com account. Then, I also learned I also had subscriptions to findmypast.com and myheritage.com. Without realizing it, I already had full access to the most powerful resources in the business. Of course I had to use them. I added a subscription to Newspapers.com, which busted everything open.

See, a lot of people before me have scoured Familysearch and Ancestry, and snagged all the "low-hanging" fruit. Findmypast and Newspapers were left nearly untouched, so that's where I got started. Within literally minutes, I had scores of articles about my 2nd great grandfather, John James, dating from the late 1880s to the mid 1950s. Turns out he was a mover and a shaker, not to mention having worked at Deseret News in Salt Lake City, Utah--he knew the biz and he got his stuff put in the papers. He straight up dropped letters in the Salt Lake City papers, and they published them! I learned things about uncles and aunts I never knew I had, even those living in Wales, where their papers are terrible (sorry, but it's true--unless your ancestors were a "big deal" in the UK prior to WWII, you have like a 1 in 4 shot in finding anything).

Then, I took Ancestry's DNA test. I had thought that it was magical, that it would just link you up with everyone related to you and place you on one big family tree. Nope. Your genealogical trail is only as good as your relatives make them. It's up to you to do the rest. Sadly, the majority of Ancestry DNA test takers snag their ethnicity results and then peace out. Still, there are enough decent users who actually link family trees to their tests that you can puzzle out where a lot of other people fall in.

One extremely powerful tool is the DNA Circles feature on Ancestry. Without going into too much detail (go here, I have), not everyone gets the same amount of DNA from our ancestors, since the process is a bit random. You'll definitely get approximately 50/50 of your DNA from your parents, 25% from each of your grandparents, but there's enough variability in those numbers that by the time you get 6 or so generations back, there's increasing chances that you wouldn't find any inherited DNA. What DNA Circles does is it correlates all available family trees linked to DNA tests and then combines everyone into one big group.

So, what is pictured above is my biggest DNA circle for George Douglass, who is my 4th great grandfather. He's kind of "Mormon royalty," by which I mean that he was one of the early converts to the LDS faith. He died in Nauvoo, and had like, a dozen kids. For those not in the know, Mormons are notorious for big families, although back in the 19th century this wasn't that unusual. The unusual part was the polygamous families, which make sorting out kids a headache. Anyway, note how the top has a highlighted group (FR are my mom's initials, who also took a DNA test), with 2 members. That includes me and my mom--we got unique parts of our DNA from George Douglass, but we share similar markers to all these other groups highlighted in orange. There are a few groups that aren't highlighted--that means that my mom and I have no common DNA with them, but they have common DNA with other people with whom we do have commonalities.

That's why it's useful to have as many people as possible take the DNA test--this improves the knowledge of the DNA of the original ancestor. You see, many people may look at their "DNA Matches" on Ancestry to see to whom they may be related that has taken a test. DNA matches won't show any of the people that aren't highlighted in that DNA Circles picture, even though you do have a relationship to them (5th-6th cousin, probably, in this case)--it's just not detectable in DNA.

OK, more on the DNA matches feature. If you're lucky enough to have your parents tested, you can filter your shared matches by your mother or your father's side. There are other filtering features that I won't get into. You see, hopefully, a long list of DNA relatives. The list is sorted by relationship proximity (immediate family first, then 1st cousins, 2nd, and so forth). The easiest matches to identify are those who have linked a family tree and have a "Shared Ancestor" hint (leaf icon). That means they linked a tree that has a common ancestor with you, and you can at a glance determine how you're related. Then you have everyone else. There are those who have put in family trees that may either have errors or don't go far enough back to see your common ancestor. Here you have to look at the surnames and see if anything looks familiar.

Then, you fire up the "Shared Matches" tab on your DNA match. This will filter down only to those matches which you and the selected DNA match have in common. By design (sigh), they'll only be sorted by proximity to you--you have no idea how closely your match relates to others (MyHeritage does this better...but with a smaller user base). This list may be helpful if you've identified other matches...if not, you only can put these shared matches into a mental category (Ancestry's organization tools are lacking). What I've been doing in the past months is going through and using the "notes" feature to identify the links to everyone I can, so I now have a fairly powerful database whenever I look at shared matches.

There are matches who have family trees but never linked their DNA tests. This often can be an unexpected gold mine, so never pass up a peek if you see an unlinked tree. That's the basis for my brief story later. Lastly, there are the hordes of DNA matches with nothing attached. GAH. The best thing you can do is sort with "Shared Matches" and bucket them with other people you have successfully identified. I'll try to message those people too, but all too often they are people who bought a test to see if they're Irish or whatever and then bugged out when they got bored (and are completely missing the point).

Alright, that's enough background. Let's walk through a fascinating discovery I made this morning.

William Williams, 4th great-grandfather
For those who have Welsh heritage, this is an awesome name. It's...uncommonly common. Plus, his son William Williams was my 3rd great grandfather. So there's already a major point of ambiguity...fortunately that's easy enough to sort out if you know relative ages of those on the records. I have one record that I can really hold to: the 1851 Wales Census. That's because he and his family lived on the same little Bargeman's Row in Swansea as the Morgans, whose daughter, Mary Morgan, married his son, William Williams. They lived there after they were married, too.

In any case, William Williams has his birthplace listed as Llansamlet around 1806. His wife, Ann, from Swansea. I cannot find any record of their marriage, which would have been recorded in parish records, somewhere, because this was pre-1837, when the British government began to take responsibility for vital records rather than the Anglican church. I found one possible baptism record for him in Llansamlet, but with no mother listed.

Anyway, William and Ann had 2 daughters, Catherine and Elizabeth (assuming they were theirs, not from different marriages or something), who disappeared off the face of the earth by 1861, because William and Ann did. I think Ann died, but like 20 Ann Williams died between 1851 and 1861 in Swansea. William may have died too, but I also found a William Williams down the street from his same-named-son in the 1861 Census, but he's 15 years older than he was in 1851, living as a lodger, and having Swansea as his birthplace. Maybe it's him. In any case, the search is kind of at a standstill.

Then I started looking at my William Williams Jr DNA circle (no one has really researched the elder William Williams besides myself). I believe the circles also only work if people have the common ancestor in a family tree, because I checked out one of my circle mate's shared DNA matches and found people I didn't recognize. Clicking around, I found a couple of people descended from St Jean's (only after checking their unlinked trees...the things I do for these people!). Incidentally, I had an interesting interchange with a Canadian St. Jean on MyHeritage, who was adopted--she was actually descended from the Hudsons. So, I was intrigued when I saw that these St. Jeans were from Canada but moved to Montana. Then I saw that the oldest St. Jean was Annie Davis before she was married--a Welsh name.

None of the other names in that tree sounded super Welsh. I remembered a conversation I had with someone with Welsh relatives who immigrated to Montana for the mining there, and I started doing some more digging. It turned out that this Annie Davis was born in Wales and immigrated as a young kid, at least, according to US Census records. I couldn't find any marriage records for her though, which usually list parents. I was able to leverage "Hints" after adding her to my tree since other people had done some research on her, and I learned that she and her husband moved to California in the 1930s. The trail went cold after 1940, the latest available US Census until 2022, when the 1950 becomes available.

I started researching her husband, who died in 1934. His California death index smashed "St. Jean" to "StJean." As soon as I searched for his wife's death record, Annie "StJean," I found her passing in 1946. That's when Newspapers.com came in handy. I easily found her death notice in the LA Times, which mentioned her children and two siblings, a brother and a sister. At first I tried looking up the brother, Wilfred Davis (which I thought odd, since her husband was Wilfred St Jean), and found way too many hits. I turned to the sister, knowing that she had a spouse with the last name Nevin.

Boom. Ada Nevin, back in Butte, Montana. I got her 1897 marriage certificate (Montana apparently had awesome records), which listed John Davis and Elizabeth Williams Davis as her parents.

My heart skipped a beat.

I started researching Elizabeth Davis and found her 1918 obituary in the Butte Miner, which said she was born in Swonsil, Wales (rofl...it's Swansea). Montana is awesome...the freaking UK didn't bother to put parents' names on death certificates until after 1950, but the 1918 Montana death certificate listed her father.

Yeah. That's William Williams. SHE DISAPPEARED BECAUSE SHE MARRIED AND MOVED TO MONTANA. Her birth date listed makes her 4 years younger that she was on the 1851 Census, but the fact that I have this paper trail in addition to a DNA match speaks volumes. I'm going to contact my DNA match to see what they know about their ancestry that they may have not put out in a family tree.

The connections we make are surprising--the most important thing is to follow the records, as much as you can. It's tempting to claim heritage to someone cool or awesome, but honestly, the people who are your progenitors are awesome in some way that you may not even realize.