Quite some time ago I was a guest on the podcast for Ancestor’s Alive’s (AncestorsAlive!) “From Paper to People” podcast, discussing the connection we can establish with our family tree by cooking our ancestor’s recipes (Episode 26: Emily’s Casserole). It was a pleasure to discuss culinary genealogy, and if you’re not listening to Carolynn’s show you should be (subscribe in all the usual places) as she’s one of the few genealogy podcasts that’s really caught our attention.
She came to our attention with a previous episode on a family recipe that helped tell a story from her family’s history (Episode 23: Johnny Mazetti, or is it Marzetti?), at the end of which she put out a call for others who had similar stories. While ours doesn’t trace actual family history, and in fact technically doesn’t come from our direct family per se, it really does tell a story, so we reached out and Carolynn invited us on.
The episode discusses a casserole that was made by family “friend” Emeline “Emily” Ott (1908-1992). Emily was “adopted” by Michael’s 2x great grandparents E.A. and Myra (Tradewell) Morse in Antigo, as told by family lore. Apparently E.A. owned rental properties and happened to see the conditions she was being raised in and brought her home to live with his family. She’s listed as as servant in the 1930 US Census and she would continue that role when E.A. and Myra’s only child Catherine (1911-1991) married, took over the Morse home, and have 5 sons. Emily was a key presence in Catherine’s home, essentially serving as a nanny for the 5 boys. She lived with Catherine long after the children moved out, and we all grew up with Emily as a constant in Catherine’s home. Each of the boys were deeply attached to her and we all visited her in assisted living apartment after Catherine sold the home and moved to her lake cottage in the 1980’s.
Emily’s Casserole
3 lbs. thin sliced potatoes
1 bad of carrots, sliced
1 medium-large sliced onion
1 ½ lbs. ground beef, browned*
1 can Cream of Celery soup
1 can of milk
Directions:
Butter dutch oven, and layer in potatoes, carrots, onions and ground beef. Mix soup with milk, and pour over top. Cover and bake at 350 degrees for an hour and a half.
Emily’s casserole was a staple for Michael’s dad growing up. It was a favorite of his father’s and mom got the recipe from Emily knowing it was always enjoyed, and easy to make. It became a part of his comfort food repertoire, just like it had been for his father, and it’s now a part of his children’s. (Editor’s Note: In the interest of transparency, the subject of this blog is not a big fan of this casserole and it’s not as regular in our family dinner rotation as it once was…but it we keep trying!)
Another historical recipe, taken from the boxes of recipe cards inherited when Michael’s Grandmother Mandy passed away, detailing her grandmother’s sourdough starter…with potatoes!
That a dish named for Emily was one of the comfort foods for Michael’s grandfather and great uncles when they were children tells us a lot about our family history. Emily was like a sister to Grandma Leonard, but never too much like a sister. She was always an employee from her first day in the household, first for the Morse family, and then for their daughter who was very close in-age. It was an interesting dynamic that wasn’t fully apparent to the grandchildren of Catherine, but it runs deeply through the fabric of today. She had a deep, emotional impact on us, but she wasn’t family…but she was, even if she was an employee.
We’ll feature Emily in more detail in a future post, but today take a listen to Carolynn’s amazing podcast, where she helps pull the details of this story out…and shows how sometimes a casserole isn’t just a casserole!
We’re willing to bet every family historian and genealogist has stories of areas where there isn’t the level of documents you’d find in other areas. Sometimes it’s a County where there was a devastating fire at the courthouse that destroyed every Vital Record and Probate/Property record before a certain date. Or it’s societal like if you’re searching for African American Vital Records in the South before 1905 or so, there was a concerted effort post-Reconstruction to focus on white records only. Other times it can be the “Manifest Destiny” states had European settlers long before any Federal/State government was established, and then when the States were formed formal Vital Record collection often lagged.
For our family there is no area in the United States that’s a more pernicious, more complete, black hole than the Upper Hudson River valley of New York from 1780-1840. When you’re looking for records in Greene, Ulster, Dutchess, Columbia, Albany, Rensselaer, Schoharie and Delaware County, every one found can feel like a miracle.
as Grandpa Ken Mandy the Charter Captain would always say, “That’s why they call it fishing not catching”. We guess this is fun because it’s not easy!
Contributing factors
There’s not a lot of empirical research on what causes this gap. It’s known to other researchers, but there’s no consensus on why. In our experience, there seems to be several unique factors that created this void of information:
Late collection of Vital Records on the County/State level
While the area was partially settled by Europeans going back to the 1600’s, when the Dutch left and Americans started their migration around the Revolutionary War. Migration picked up with the Mohawk Wars pushing Native residents off their land in the late 1700’s, but you see counties like Greene not collecting birth and death information until it becomes a statewide requirement in 1880. That’s true for most of these counties, and they didn’t capture all “required” records until 20-30 years after that. By then they had over 100 years of settlement with no centralized record collection. By comparison, our home county of Racine in Wisconsin was first settled in 1835 and Marriage records were collected by 1837, Deaths by 1853, and Births by 1876.
The area was often a migration waypoint
A pattern we see repeatedly is a family born in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Downstate New York migrate to the region around 1780-1800, establish a farm and then several of their children (or Grandchildren) migrate further West to Ohio, Michigan, or Wisconsin and establish their family histories in the new location. Almost invariably their records like oral histories, family bibles, etc. omit details of their Eastern families and the few church records, etc. will maybe list a birth/baptism record in an area in New York, but nothing further because marriages and deaths occur in other states.
Churches were numerous, and consolidation of records seems rare
New York in the late 18th and early 19th Century was a hotbed for the Second Great Awakening in American religion (Link), and while it doesn’t seem that “new” churches/denominations were as prevalent in this area as Western New York, it does appear that every village had it’s own congregation of each of the more established faiths (Dutch Reformed, Congregationalist, Methodist, etc.) but as these communities grew and contracted, the local church seems more likely to end than to merge with a neighboring congregation. This leaves a lot of records that were lost to history, or which were locally held and not collected in larger Church records. The Family Search library is full of these small congregational records, often collected by amateur family historians and published locally…which limits their availability.
An example of the fragmented church records from the Hudson River Valley: a list of Vital Records from two Schoharie County, NY churches, collected in 1918, typed and indexed in 1999, and only available at the LDS FamilySearch library in Salt Lake City, Utah
The interest in genealogy by the public at-large started a Generation after the children/Grandchildren of the original European settlers in this area had moved on
Many of the self-published Family Histories that become more common in the mid-1870’s (tying in with the US Centennial) and remained a Genealogy staple into the 1940’s. These were compiled long after many of the children/grandchildren of the late 1700’s settlers had moved out of the area. The popularization of Genealogy as a hobby really kicked off with the ubiquitous “vanity” publications that became a staple starting around 1876. You start to see books like “History of Greene County, New York : with biographical sketches of prominent men” (published in 1884) which were collections of publicly available Vital/Historical records, knitted together as a narrative (often by local historians hired by the publisher), and included biographies of any “notable” family that paid the requisite fee to have their family history published (that they themselves drafted and submitted to the publisher). Because the biographies were self-submitted, they are often a wonderful almost first-hand listing of parents, marriages, and children but only for the families of means that stayed in that area. Similar books were published in the locations these New York children/grandchildren migrated to, but they rarely list more than the county of their birth (at best) and we’ve never found one that listed details on their parents of siblings back home.
Another way this manifested is that during this rise in interest of family histories, there’s numerous examples of individuals who dedicated years to collecting various local records into what now might be the only surviving data on birth/marriage/deaths. Lists like the Barbour Collection and James Arnold’s 21 volume “Vital records of Rhode Island 1636-1850″ largely don’t exist for this region. Part of that is because there are no central collections to reference, part of that is because by 1880 most County local historians don’t have the experience or people to provide pre-1840 information about the area. Additionally Vital Records were just starting to be gathered by governments.
An example
Many of our most stubborn brick walls are related to families that migrated to Wisconsin from this area of New York, and we have little to no information on them before the migration. Our Tradewell, Yeoman, Place, and Blackmar lines all dead-end in the Mohawk Valley and have resisted our best efforts.
Our most recent example is the Blackmar line, which we discovered after we were able to prove our Yeoman line back one generation after 2 years of research (story coming soon!)
Once we broke through the Yeoman brick wall and first identified William and Lucinda (Blackmar) Yeoman from Greene County, New York as our 6th GGP we celebrated for about 3 minutes before we wondered “who are their parents?”.
Given the pain we had on the Yeoman line, we knew breaking down William’s parents was going to be a major challenge, but we decided that “Blackmar” was unique enough of a last name to take a quick look and see if we could identify her lineage. But, we’re searching in the Hudson River Valley Black Hole so of course we found literally nothing.
The only Blackmar from New York in right timeframe was Cain Blackmar who is in the 1790 US Census living in Dutchess County. We found Cain in the 1800 US Census, as well as the Federal tax records for 1801 and 1802 and that’s it. There is no records of his family, his wife, or his children in New York. It’s a hot lead that Lucinda likely is Cain’s daughter, but it can be nothing but a guess.
Searching Ancestry for Cain Blackmar immediately brought up one of the self-published family histories that, as we mentioned above, were pretty common in New England. We eventually found two, both published in the early 1930’s, whose authors both traveled the region and found 1000’s of local records from Massachusetts and Rhode Island then published detailed (but unsourced) family trees. Just like that we were able to back from Cain to his ancestors going back to arrivals in 1630. We can go back 6 generations from Cain in Rhode Island, but we have essentially nothing on Cain or his children in New York.
We had a complete line back to Hannah Yeoman (1796-1865) as soon we started charting our family tree. But getting from Hannah to her mom took 10 years, including 2 years of intensive research given the limited resources from the Hudson River Valley. After another 6 months of research we have only a guess on her father. There are zero records relating to that father’s wife (FamilySearch’s global, single Family Tree has his spouse listed as “Mrs. Cain Blackmar”), but since he’s from Rhode Island we can effortlessly trace him back to his English ancestors in the 1590’s.
This does not meet the Genealogical Proof Standard
This leaves us with a new brick wall merely because this family was in the Hudson River Valley in the early 1800’s. Just one generation in upstate New York and this branch became impenetrable. But, as Grandpa Mandy the Charter Captain would always say, “That’s why they call it fishing not catching”. We guess this is fun because it’s not easy!
Patrica’s loss hit the entire family hard. Her death was unexpected, even after years of various health issues. She was only 61 years old and full of life…it just didn’t seem like it was her time. We were jolted because we’d literally just reached out to her to learn how she knew (guessed?) the secret that her Father had a child with her Aunt. A secret that took us 4 DNA tests and years of research to piece together. It didn’t seem real that we couldn’t just pick up the phone and ask her family history questions anymore. It really hit us when it sunk in she wouldn’t ever be laughing with us as she doted on our children.
Her brothers, who a day before sat in our Dining Room receiving our big news, were now in charge of their sister’s funeral. They asked if we’d do the obituary and was a natural ask. We’d probably read more obituaries than anyone else they knew, but it was a sobering task for someone we loved so much.
A Second Family
Funeral Program, Patricia White (1958-2109)
In addition to learning that Felice’s Mother “Susan” was Pat’s half-Sister, we also had recently figured out their Father Luther had a 2nd family. Two of his daughters from that 2nd marriage tested with AncestryDNA, and we had confirmed their linage through vital records. They had just lost a half-Sibling, and the brothers agreed we should confirm their information for the obituary. We reached out to both of the DNA testers, leaving messages about losing their half-Sister.
One of the siblings responded, and we found out that we had unknowingly opened up old wounds. Luther’s 2nd family was close to him, closer than the children of his 1st marriage. While his 2nd family was news to most of us, Luther’s children from his marriage to Ann knew of them. They were apparently dismissive and cold as Luther was dying.
The dynamics became apparent when we learned we’d never get a response from the other DNA tester. The wounds and anger ran too deep. Even the tester we were working with was struggling hard participating with us. She understood we played no role in the drama, and she had enjoyed their time with Pat. But there was too much damage done to want to revisit this side of the family. She did eventually provide information on her siblings which allowed us to include them in the obituary. However, even though they lived in town, two of the children from the 2nd marriage did not attend her funeral.
After the Funeral
After the funeral, our contact with the 2nd family asked about Susan’s DNA results. She too couldn’t figure out how Susan could be so close a match. We explained that her Father had a child with the Sister of his first wife, and that only added to the pain we’d opened. In the end it was all too much. While very supportive and respectful, it was clear she needed some time before reaching out again. I doubt we’ll ever initiate another conversation with the 2nd family.
Ann’s surviving children now know that Susan is their half-Sister, as well as their 1st cousin. They have decided that Ann doesn’t need to know the truth, and we won’t be bringing it up. For this reason, we didn’t include Susan as a sibling in Pat’s obituary.
One Last Puzzle to Solve
When we started that Super Bowl Sunday we had two theories: 1) Susan was the Daughter of Luther; and 2) Luther’s Grandmother Sarah Moore’s maiden name was Jones and she was the daughter of Roman and Mary Jones. Several months later, the final piece of that puzzle fell into place.
The proof on the second theory came when we were browsing around FamilySearch in December that year. There was a hint showing the Marriage Register of Joseph and Sarah Moore, married in 1894 in Carroll County, Mississippi. Carroll County is where Roman and Mary had raised there children and would reside in until their deaths. The marriage record showed that Sarah’s maiden name was Jones, and she was born in 1873. That’s the matches the records for Roman and Mary’s daughter.
Susan Moore is the missing link to 17 DNA matches
Combined with our other research, we’re confident this being the same Sarah meets the Genealogical Proof Standard. Additionally, the cM’s in other the DNA tests fit and support this link. We’re now able to link our family tree with the 17 DNA matches we’d grouped together in the “Casting a Wide Net” series.
Putting it All Together
In the end we realized we had much of the data needed to break down these brick walls all along. Going back to June 2018 we had a good idea that Susan and Charles were closer than 1st Cousins. If we’d opened our minds a bit, we likely should have figured out they shared Fathers. We had Sarah Jones’ daughter in our family tree, and a little digging could have likely linked her pretty quickly. Also, it was pretty clear there was no link on Susan’s maternal line to those 17 DNA matches.
Even with that, it took a stroke of inspiration on a random Super Bowl Sunday to put it all together. We learned our lesson on this. Again. We often have all we need to solve these mysteries, we just need to better examine the data. We also opened more family wounds than we would have liked, including ones with families we didn’t even know existed. Additionally, there doesn’t feel like we have any closure by resolving Felice’s Mother’s biggest family history mystery. Susan doesn’t discuss her father and the family dynamic hasn’t changed. While they all know they are 1/2 siblings, they still rarely interact…just like Cousins.
Was it worth it?
Michael’s family tree is now more complete and the stories of Roman and Mary Jones help round out his family history. Genealogically, it was a clear success and two brick walls have been toppled. Still, it’s hard to see this as a victory. These “mysteries” often weren’t that when the people involved were alive. It’s likely become lost to future generations because those who lived them didn’t want them to be known. They often aren’t just quirks of poor record keeping. Brick walls aren’t always meant to fall.
We’ve said it before in this blog: Building a family tree using DNA testing is serious (Family History is a hobby…but DNA is serious business). Even when the tools work better than hoped, the results can be complicated and painful. We will always tell the truth we find in our journey, but we have learned to consider whether we want an answer to the questions we ask.
In the months after that Super Bowl Sunday Felice and I talked a lot about sharing what we suspected. We talked to her Mother “Susan” to gauge if she wanted to know if we found troubling results. She was hard to read. Susan seemed pretty indifferent, but it also seemed like she was increasingly uncomfortable with discussing the topic.
The cousin with the very high centimorgan match with Susan also had a deep interest in Felice’s family history. “Charles” is the son of “Ann”, but he’d focused more on his Mother’s side when he was doing family research. At the time, he was the only DNA test we had to reference for his Father Luther’s decedents. We started working with Charles getting his test into GEDmatch and leverage their tools to confirm our “3/4 Sibling” theory.
We also started building out Luther’s family tree, and ordered the Birth/Marriage/Death records of himself, his siblings, parents, and children. After Luther and Ann split in Mississippi, she moved to Milwaukee and he moved to Hartford, CT. Luther started a second family with a woman and they had 6 children together.
Our new theoreticalfamily tree
The work to move Charles’ test into GEDmatch had fallen off (as we began to question if we would continue using GEDmatch for our African American family). In the meantime we were surprised by two new DNA test matches for Susan. Two of Luther’s children from his second marriage tested with Ancestry, and they matched both Susan and Charles as half-siblings. That sealed it. We didn’t need to do a deeper dive into their chromosomes. There was no doubt that Luther was the father to the 2 new siblings, as well as Charles and Susan.
It was time to talk to Susan, especially because we needed to understand from her how we could proceed and if we could share this information with anyone but her. Felice and I talked to her early in the summer of 2019, and she didn’t show much reaction. She was pretty calm about it, and we weren’t quite sure if they believed it or not. In the end, proving how she matched the children from Luther’s second marriage settled it. Susan was ok with us sharing this with whomever we wanted, and we decided that we’d talk with Charles next. As a fellow family historian, he was most interested, and he’d know how to approach his mother Ann about this.
We had a few more conversations with Susan, giving her time to change her mind. But she was fine, and about 6 weeks later we setup a time to have Charles to talk.
He brought his brother “George” with the next Friday and we laid out everything we knew. They were speechless. We talked it through a few times, and they understood that we’d found the truth: Susan was not just their cousin but their sister as well, and that their Father had been with their Aunt at least once.
Patricia, with Michael, Shakiera and Felice in 2014
At the end of it all, George calmly said “You know, all these years and Patricia was right. She said dad was Susan’s dad and I just brushed it off. But somehow, she knew…she was right!”. This just rocked our world.
Patricia was their baby sister, and we are close to her. She was our first family history interview subject and had been a valuable source. Pat loved to share stories about the family and bound everyone together for us. Pat was one of our first family history interviews and we had asked her who might be Susan’s Father. She was the first person to share “Big James” as the most likely candidate, but now it appeared this deep family secret wasn’t secret to her. Pat just hadn’t shared it with us.
As soon as the brothers left, we called Pat and left a message asking her to call us back. Our voicemail explained that we had some information we’d come across and we wanted get together the next day. It had been too long since we’d talked to Pat, and we loved seeing her so we were excited. Plus, it sounded like she was going to help fill in some of the gaps on this major family twist.
Unfortunately, we’d never get to discuss these findings with her. We received a call from Charles the next morning that she had passed away unexpectedly overnight. Not only were we grieving the loss of one of our favorite family members, but one of the keys to unlocking this mystery was now gone…just a few hours after we found out she held that key. We were stunned.
This turn of events would only bring more family pain to the surface, even as the last pieces of this mysterious family tree fell into place.
One of the all-time best family history interviews we’ve ever conducted was with Felice’s Great Aunt “Ann”. Ann and Felice’s Grandmother Delia were well known for being pretty crazy in their younger days. They were clearly free spirits who came of age about 20 years too early, and too deep in the bible belt. They would have fit well into the Summer of Love in 1967, or the singles bar scene of any major city in the 1970s. Neither was single, but that was never an issue for them.
By the time Super Bowl XV kicked off that night we knew we likely had identified Felice’s mystery Grandfather. We also knew that we were going to be changing a lot of family history.
Ann, who is now 82, has always been a kind, happy woman. Never out to hurt anyone, but never too concerned about what others thought about her ways. She told us stories about how she married her first husband, Luther White when she was pregnant at 13 years old. They only briefly lived together and she “made him stay in the streets because he was a whore”. Ann said he would come over from time-to-time and she’d “let him do what he had to do”, which resulted in them having a child every year or two. Luther’s parents supported her and the children, and they went on to have 9 children together.
Ann eventually moved out of the White household, and soon found a man to move in with. She explained that she needed a “babysitter” so she and Delia could go out and enjoy themselves, and this man fit the bill. Ann says that Delia might have been a little crazier than her, but they were clearly partners in crime.
Transcript of Ann’s family history interview
One of the more telling stories Ann told us was from when Delia was living next door to Ann’s close friend Lilymae. Lilymae’s husband Jack and Delia were having an affair, but Ann wasn’t going to get involved. She didn’t judge her sister. Despite being friends with Lilymae, when she got in a physical fight with Delia over the affair, Ann sided with her sister. Ann told her best friend she’d “beat her ass” if she touched Delia again.
That interview was playing through our head that Super Sunday as the theory that Luther was Mary’s father dawned on us. There’s no reason to doubt that Delia might sleep with her sister’s husband. And, if she had gotten pregnant by Luther it could explain why Delia wouldn’t put the father on Susan’s birth certificate. She said she didn’t know who the father was, but it’s likely Delia knew exactly who it was. Susan’s Grandfather didn’t want her to not have a listed father. He filled out the Birth Certificate, entered the name of the man who fathered Delia’s other two children, and life moved on.
Since Delia passed away in 1999, and Luther in 1994, there would be no first-hand confirmation of this theory. We had only DNA to go on.
Purported photo of Roman and Mary (Stewart) Jones
From our interview with Ann, we knew only that Luther’s parents were Ira and Eula White, so we started there. The work we did in “Casting a Wide Net” pointed to Roman and Mary Jones as our target Most Recent Common Ancestor. We identified 17 DNA matches who shared the Jones’ as their MCRA. If the link between Roman and Mary and Susan was through Luther’s family, either Ira or Eula had to be a descendant.
We first mapped out that Ira White was the son of Pleasant and Cora (Gordon) White. The White family was in the Northeast Mississippi area around the same time as Roman and Mary Jones, but not in close proximity. Pleasant and Cora were both born enslaved, but we were able to establish both of their sets of parents. None of them lined up with what we knew about Roman and Mary.
We then shifted to Eula’s line and discovered her parents, Joseph and Sarah Moore, were living in the same County as the Roman and Mary at the same time. From our earlier research, we knew the Jones’ listed a daughter Sarah in the 1880 US Census, who was born about 1873. As we researched Sarah Moore we found her in the 1900 Census, with her birth date listed as November 1872.
If we can prove Sarah Moore was born Sarah Jones, we can establish the match to the 17 DNA lines we’ve linked, and prove that Susan’s Father was Luther White.
We had a solid lead that only got more firm as we looked further. When we mapped out the 17 DNA matches using DNA Painter using the theory that Luther’s Grandmother Sarah Moore was born Sarah Jones, it all lined up as expected.
By the time Super Bowl XV kicked off that night we knew we likely had identified Felice’s mystery Grandfather. We also knew that we were going to be changing a lot of family history. Ann is still alive, and if we were right her children would learn their Father had an affair with their Aunt, and their cousin also their half-Sister. For Susan discovering her long lost Father was not going to bring the happy reunion, we’d hoped for.
But, our disruption of the family history would stretch further than we knew at the time.
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