Tag: Family Tree

Finding the Yeomans

2+ years of research on one of our stubborn bricks walls fell with the discovery of a single record

Finding the Yeomans <h4>2+ years of research on one of our stubborn bricks walls fell with the discovery of a single record</h3>

A few years ago it was time to tackle the brick wall of who were the parents of Andrew and Hannah (Yeomans) Place. The Place family history after they arrived in Wisconsin is well known to us. They were some of the first 50 or so Americans to arrive in the Wisconsin Territory during the summer of 1835, and their arrival and early experiences were documented years later by Charles Dyer in a 1871 speech to the for the Old Settlers Society of Racine County (Link). However, despite their Great-Granddaughter Myra (Tradewell) Morse (1870-1960) being the first great historian of our family, she never documented her Great-grandparents.

Family tree showing Hannah Yeomans descendants to Catherine (Morse) Leonard
Andrew and Hannah (Yeomans) Place’s descendants to Michael’s Great Grandmother Catherine (Morse) Leonard

Starting with Andrew Place’s parents

Andrew Thomas Place (1793-1837) was known to have traveled with his wife and 6 children by Ox cart from Greene County, NY, however not much before that has been documented. Searching for Place families and birth/marriage/death records for him produced no results.

The Hudson River valley in New York between the end of the Revolutionary War and the beginning of the Civil War is a well known dead zone for genealogical records (Suffering the Black Hole of Hudson River Valley Genealogy). For whatever reason(s) collection of church records are spotty at best, governmental records weren’t kept until later, and the Morman Church’s microfilm projects capturing this area’s civil records has large holes. Combine that with this area being very transitory over a few generations, with families moving in from Massachusetts and Connecticut soon after the Revolution, and their children/grandchildren moving West as they reached adulthood. Our ancestors didn’t leave as much of a paper trail in this region, and few of those papers have been digitized and indexed compared to other parts of the country.

Using Greene County as a jumping off point we built a table of each of the Place family entries in the 1790 US Census for there and the surrounding counties. Repeating the same process for the 1800-1830 census’ built a decent map of the original Place settlers and their children who stayed in the area.

The first item that popped out was an entry in the 1820 Census, in Greenville, Greene County, NY for Andrew T Place. The known birthdates of Hannah and their children matched the 1820 entry for Andrew, which was a strong lead that he was from the Greenville area. Assuming he might have bought his farm near his parents, we found a Thomas Place in Greenville, and these were the only 2 Places listed in Greene County. Searching the 1810 Census there was no entry for any Place family, but going manually through the entries for Greenville we found Thomas Place indexed under the wrong last name.

There is that 3 minutes of bliss when you realize all those years of research just paid off, out of the blue, and you just made a link that no one has ever made before…But very quickly the bliss fades and you ask the inevitable question: “I wonder who THEIR parents were?”

Now that we had a good lead that Andrew’s father was Thomas and they resided in Greenville, NY we searched Ancestry for records that match him. There were several hits for various parts of Thomas’ Will/Probate in 1848, but nothing that spelled out his children other than his son and executor, Jeramiah Place. Using those records, we went to FamilySearch and browsed the Probate records for Greene Co. We found his Will, but his wife and 2 surviving children were the only ones listed. It’s not surprising, but frustrating nonetheless!

Given that Thomas is a much more common name than Jeremiah, we tried a newspaper search on his name, narrowing down to 1848, and we hit paydirt! As a part of Thomas’ Probate process Jeremiah published a Notice of Hearing for the commissioner, calling out the heirs of Thomas specifically which included: “children of Andrew Place, a deceased son, all of Racine, Wisconsin Territory”. It also listed the other siblings of Andrew, which we’d established previously. With that we’d firmly proven that Thomas and Phoebe Place from Greenville, NY were Andrew’s parents.

It was on next to establish Hannah (Yeomans) Place’s parents, and while it took just a few weeks for Andrew, it would take over 2 years to break through and find hers.

Finding Hannah’s parents

Since we now knew that Andrew as raised and likely married in Greenville, NY, we started searching for Hannah’s parents in Greene County. There were 3 Yeomans registered in the 1810 US Census for Greene Co., and all 3 had a daughter Hannah’s age listed in the census. Next, as we did with Andrew, we built out tables for the 1790-1820 Census for every Yeoman in the counties bordering Greene, and tried to establish patterns of which children might be associated with which parents, and from that built 9 working trees to flesh out the people and families we were discovering.

Excel spreadsheet cells listing values from the 1790-1830 US Census and the Yeoman family names that match each value
Our makeshift pre-1850 US Census tables, used to align the generic numbers from the census to the known family members we’re researching, to visually identify the gaps and narrow down if there’s a match. Green means the census value matches a known family member, Yellow means the value is within 2 years of a known family member

Right away we hit that Hudson Valley wall and kept running into dead ends as we searched Ancestry and accepted as many shaky leaf hints as we could. We started searching for any Greene Co. Yeomans in member trees, and in a Public tree we found Elisha B Yeoman (1814-1850). The person didn’t have any facts attached in the tree but when we searched we found an index page for Greene County Probate Records from 1850, and we could see his probate was recorded on page 55. We switched over to FamilySearch, which had the Probate books microfilmed, and guessed which book to check based on his death year.

In Book H of the Greene County “Record of Wills” we found Elisha’s will recorded and it listed his location as Greenville, which puts him in the same town/time as Andrew Place…and likely Hannah. Unusually, his heirs weren’t just his wife and children. Elisha also listed 4 siblings as back-ups in-case his children didn’t survive to adulthood to collect their share: Leonard, William I, George C, and Catherine. We added the siblings to our tree and searched for birth/marriage/death records for each helped flesh out the tree, and it gave us more data points to track as we compared various Yeomans in the area to the families in the 1790-1820 US Census.

Still focusing on the 1810 US Census (knowing it should list Hannah in her father’s home for the last time), and breaking out all of Yeoman/Youman/Yumans in Greene and surrounding counties, 3 families came into focus: James and Jeremiah Yumans in Coeymans, Albany County and William Yeoman in Greenville. William would seem the most likely patriarch, being in Greene County, however the Coeymans and Greenville townships (Greenville is in New Baltimore) abut each other separated by the country border. The areas both families lived in were likely less than 10 miles from each other, which makes it reasonable Hannah could have been a part of any of them.

Old map of Albany and Greene County New York
Map from 1875 showing the proximity of Coeyman’s Hollow and Green Ville, where our 3 target Yeomans/Yumans families were located

During this time we also found a cluster of Yeomans that could have been the father and siblings of Hannah, except they were in Delaware County, NY (about 55 miles west of Greenville/Coeymans). William Yeomans (1773-1857) census info matched what we knew for the most part, but it wasn’t a complete match. We found Delaware County William’s Probate and it listed 7 of his children. Those children didn’t overlap Hannah’s known siblings, but we couldn’t rule him out because at this time we only knew of a cluster of 5 siblings in Greene County that didn’t even include Hannah. FindaGrave had a record in Delaware for “William” that seemed to match William I, but that was the only record to go on.

All attempts to research the James and Jeremiah families in Albany County were a dead end. The few Albany County land and probate records are almost entirely unindexed, and most of them are missing from any online microfilm collections.

From Dead Ends to Breadcrumbs

Since we had run into dead-ends in Albany, Greene and Delaware counties we expanded our search for any Yeomans to surrounding counties, which is where we hit our next big breakthrough. We found the will of an unmarried woman, Emaline Yeomans (1806-1849), who died in Union Vale, Dutchess County, NY which is 75 miles from Greenville and across the Hudson River. She died with no heirs, but a substantial estate. Since she had no heirs-in-law she left her estate to her 8 siblings, including the 5 Yeoman siblings in Elisha B’s will, also Hannah (positively identified as “Hannah Place, wife of the late Andrew Place of Wisconsin”) and 2 new sisters: Lucinda and Annis.

Emaline’s will is probably our favorite probate document we’ve found! You can only glean hints at personality and family dynamics from dry vital records documents, but her will speaks volumes. First, she had 3 nieces name Emaline, and she bequeathed each $50 to be paid on their 21st birthday. To her 4 brothers (Leonard, Elisha, George and Williams) and her sister (Catherine, also listed in Elisha B’s will) she bequeathed to each of them one of her rocking chairs (their choice) worth between $12 and $15 each. The remainder of her estate was to be split between the 3 other sisters (Hannah, Lucinda and Annis), who each received about $250. There clearly was a schism between the two groups of siblings, as Elisha would pass away only a year later and leave nothing to the sisters who received the bulk of Emaline’s estate while rewarding all those who received rocking chairs. She also must have been beloved, with 3 of her sisters naming children after her…at least amongst one faction.

Diagram showing the siblings of Hannah Yeomans and which were mentioned in each others' wills

Armed with the entire, confirmed list of Yeoman siblings, we were able to confirm that both the Coeymans and Greenville patriarch’s 1810 Census entries still matched the ages of these 9 children. However, we were then able to eliminate the Delaware William as a potential father.

The trail went completely cold after this. Searching for the Probate records of each sibling lead to no new leads on their parentage. Even more frustratingly, even with a known death date for William I we could not find his probate/will.

This stalemate lasted for almost a year, and while we found more information to flesh out the spouses and children of the 8 of the 9 siblings (William I was still a mystery), there was nothing on the 3 possible patriarchs of these families.

Breakthrough!

Our focus had turned entirely to researching William I Yeoman, as he was the one sibling we had no records for. While searching for anything William Yeomans related in Ancestry one Saturday we found an image attached as a profile picture in a Public Tree that came from one of the vanity books published around the first Centennial that listed important people in a county. These books were largely self-sourced, where the subjects would pay a fee to be listed, so they often are nearly first-person family/history descriptions even if it overestimates the subject’s “importance”. Reviewing the image for William listed his wife as Mary and a son Henry J who lived in Dutchess County.

Searching Ancestry trees for Henry J Yeomans of Dutchess County, NY broke the brick wall down completely. Again, someone had attached an image to their Public tree as a profile pic for Henry J. It was an entry in another vanity book where Henry J was the subject, and it was a gold mine. It was much longer than most such entries, and it described details about his father Henry Ira who was born in Greene County and was a lifelong resident of Greenville. Just like that we’d gathered William Ira’s birth date, place, and marriage details!

Paragraph detailing the life of Henry J Yeomans

But even more amazingly the write-up (which usually wouldn’t include parents information) went further and detailed William Ira’s parents! William Yeomans (1782-) and Lucinda (Blackmer) Yeomans (1762-1819) were William I’s parents, and through the transitive properties Emaline’s, and thus Hannah’s, parents was well!

Just like that, the wall was gone. We knew the identity of Hannah’s parents! 2+ years of research had paid off and we’d moved her tree back one generation.

There is that 3 minutes of bliss when you realize all those years of research just paid off, out of the blue, and you just made a link that no one has ever made before, even your ancestor genealogists who were researching 100+ years ago. But very quickly the bliss fades and you ask the inevitable question: “I wonder who THEIR parents were?”

We can report we have no idea who their parents were…yet. It’s the same issue as when we started: there are very few records from that area, fewer are indexed, and other researchers haven’t made the links we’d build off of yet. We searched on the text of Henry J’s write up, so we could properly identify and cite it, make sure we had all of the facts of what was a working tree cited and proper, and then attached it to our main tree so that anyone else who’s been struggling with this line can now build off our research.

Family tree diagram showing Andrew and Hannah (Yeomans) Place's parents
Our final family tree after researching back one generation

In remembrance: James Bennet Tradewell (1797-1885)

In remembrance: James Bennet Tradewell (1797-1885)

On this day in 1885 James Bennet Tradewell at his home in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin at the age of either 88 or 93. He was Michael’s 4th Great Grandfather, and was the first of the Tradewell line to move to Wisconsin, arriving in 1844. He was born in Greene County, New York most probably in 1797, however his obituary claims it was about 5 years earlier.

There are no records of James’ early life, and one of our biggest genealogical brick walls is trying to identify his parents and siblings.

James served in the New York State National Guard, and we have records from 1819-1821 that show he was the equivalent of a modern 1st Lieutenant, although his obituary refers to him as a Captain so it’s likely he continued on and was promoted further. There’s also some unconfirmed indications he may have served in the War of 1812, but we haven’t been able to validate that yet.

He married Catherine (Edwards) Ellarson 3 Jan 1820 in Gilboa, New York and it appears they lived in/near this village until they moved to Wisconsin Territory. Catherine was born in 1793, and had been married for 12 years to William Ellarson before he passed in 1818. Mr. Ellarson had significant land holdings in and around Gilboa, which were inherited by Catherine upon his death. One of the parcels was sold to James’ brother Ephriam which became known as “Treadwell’s Taven Stand” in Gilboa, which was located on the plank toll road that ran through the town. Land records show that James and Ephraim and their families lived across Schoharie Creek from each other.

James and Ephraim migrated to Wisconsin in the summer of 1844, with them both settling in Kenosha before James quickly moved to Racine. In Racine James and Caty first settled at Mygatt’s Corner (currently the corner of Hwy 20 and Hwy 31) and in 1852 he sold a 1/4 acre of land the first School District in Mount Pleasant which erected the Mygatts School. James eventually settled near what was then know as “Western Union Junction” (now Sturtevant).

James and Caty (as she was known) had 5 children together: Margaret Mariah, Mary Ann, Aurelia Louisa, Harriet Augusta, and William Ephriam Wesley. Margaret (10) and Aurelia (1) both died young. Mary Ann married James Bogardus in 1844 (Sullivan County, New York) just as her parents were to set out of Wisconsin, so only Harriet and Wesley (as he was known) made the trip. Harriet married twice and ended up in Black River Falls until she passed in 1872. Wesley married Jane Place and eventually inherited Jane’s family farm that would be known to us as the Tradewell farm, about 240 acres near Spring Street and Highway H in Mount Pleasant.

Matching unmatched DNA matches by Casting a Wide Net

Matching unmatched DNA matches by Casting a Wide Net

In early 2018 we made a series of posts on how to use the multiple “Shared Matches” in AncestryDNA to narrow down the DNA line that connects you to them. The challenge was that often they have no trees, or small trees that don’t come anywhere close to matching your (much more complete!) tree.

This strategy was a way to use mirror trees to match them to themselves, which should indicate a Most Recent Common Ancestor for them, and in all likelihood to be your MCRA as well. For this series we broke down a large set of matches (5000+) to Felice’s mother, to try and establish her first DNA link outside of the immediate family.

There were all of the challenges we all face with African American genealogy (fewer family histories to draw off of, smaller trees, difficulty with 3x/4xGGP’s due to the “1870 Wall”, etc.), and in this series we found the MCRA…but we failed to find the link between them and our family. However, about a year later we broke through that wall, and we’ll be following up on that shortly. In the meantime, here’s the complete series in one page:

Matching unmatched DNA matches by Casting a Wide Net, Part 1 – A crazy, desperate idea

Matching unmatched DNA matches by Casting a Wide Net, Part 2 – Identifying all “Matches of Matches” as a Group

Matching unmatched DNA matches by Casting a Wide Net, Part 3 – Building a single tree using all of our DNA matches Public Trees

Matching unmatched DNA matches by Casting a Wide Net, Part 4 – Proving the matches, and establishing a theory of connection

Matching unmatched DNA matches by Casting a Wide Net, Part 5 – Rolling up our sleeves and doing some genealogy

Matching unmatched DNA matches by Casting a Wide Net, Part 6 – Our crazy attempt to leverage 288 DNA matches to expand our tree comes to it’s conclusion

 

 

Taking a step back from working on our Family Tree – A follow up

Taking a step back from working on our Family Tree – A follow up

In September we wrote about what is a common problem in the genealogy community: not enough time to balance work, family, and our research. We took a radical step and decided to stop working on our family tree, so we could instead focus on wrapping up other projects and to get our research, citations, and document/photo collections in order.

It’s been 7 months since wrote that piece (Link)…here’s how the plan’s going:

Keep blog posts to 500 words (Grade: F) – Our last post was almost 2000 words, our average since September is about 1000, AND we have been lucky to post 2 times a month instead of publishing weekly like we intend. Lots of work to do here.

P18-002-054

Clean, scan, and store the 2000 glass plate negatives from the Home Studio Collection (Grade: B+) – We decided not to clean them, we have the storage taken care of with all of the proper archival products. However, we got to about 70 plates scanned in October and stopped. It was too much time per plate. In response, in the last 3 months we purchased a lot of equipment to scan these more quickly and we were able to process 225 plates in about 2 hours last time we tested. We are about to finish the first crate of plates (~440 images) in 10 days! We’ll publish more details when we’re done.

While we are scoring a GPA just over a C, it’s mostly because of we failed at our primary approach of stopping work on our Family Tree.

Install a temperature/humidity control solution in our archive room (Grade: A) – It’s done! Our archives have spent the last 5-6 months at 62-65 degrees, and 42-45% humidity! There will be more work to do this summer, to cool/dehumidify the space, but we already have the controls in place.

Ensure each Source in our main, Public tree is properly cited and every Fact is supported by at least one Source (Grade: Inc) – To be fair, we started on this effort, beginning with 4xGGP Royal and Eliza (Jones) Morse (whom we’ve owed this documentation to the Morse Society for 2 years now!) 4 times, but the Family Tree Maker data corruptions kept setting this effort back (MacKiev’s Family Tree Maker is garbage). Once we got past that, we’ve made some progress, but we lost a lot of effort on this one.

Properly transcribe and index all family history interviews (Grade: C) – We’re half way there! But the last set of transcripts will be the hardest.

PUBLISH! (Grade: F) – Out blog posts are lagging, and we haven’t actually published anything outside of blogging. We’ve been reading some great family histories though, to get an idea of how others publish  their stories, so we have good ideas once we’re ready!

Write our autobiographies, as well as begin to write out what we know about our family (Grade: F) – Yeah, so…we’ve written nothing. Looking back, this probably should have been left off the list…we were just setting ourselves up for failure.

Ensure that we’re printing out all electronic sources, so that our paper files are complete copies of our electronic files (Grade: A) – We’ve been pretty diligent on this one, and while we’ve had to redo a lot of electronic source citations, we did print them all out as we created them.

Spend a little more time with the family! (Grade: A) – We could have made a lot more progress on this list if sacrificed this one, but we’re spending more time together as family now than when we first wrote this.

While we are scoring a GPA just over a C, it’s mostly because of we failed at our primary approach of stopping work on our Family Tree. Instead, we shattered our largest brick wall (while adding nearly 40 new DNA matches) and made a huge dent in another brick wall. Much more on that will follow, but both efforts took a LOT of work, and those hours spent working on the trees directly slowed down the other work we hoped to accomplish.

That said, we’ve rededicated ourselves to getting these other tasks complete so we can finally turn our full attention to building our tree. Our properly cited and sourced family tree!

How to make the most of your AncestryDNA matches: Part 6 – A science-free walk through xDNA, yDNA, and mtDNA

How to make the most of your AncestryDNA matches: Part 6 – A science-free walk through xDNA, yDNA, and mtDNA

We promised to keep this series as science-free as possible, and instead focus on the practical use of AncestryDNA tests to identify your ancestors. We’re going to keep that promise here, but we want to say a few words about other types of DNA tests you can’t get from Ancestry, and how xDNA, yDNA, and mtDNA can be useful! Just remember, we’re generalizing a bit here, and if you want the detailed science behind all of this, Google has many great reads.

yDNA and mtDNA

yDNA and mtDNA come only from your father and your mother, respectively, and change very little over the generations. These tests are often written off in the genealogical community, because they won’t, by themselves, lead you to how you are matched with someone, or how many generations back you might match them.

dna 6 - 600px-female_dna_paths
mtDNA inheritance chart. From http://www.isogg.org.

For example, if our Michael has a yDNA test and he matches “Frank” who shares the same yDNA…it tells us next to nothing. From the test we know that on Michael’s paternal line we have proved he’s matched to Frank…but there’s no way to tell how. It could be 1000 years ago we all had a MRCA, or it could be that Frank’s 4xGGF was a brother to ours, but there’s no way that kind of range will narrow it down by itself.

There are two uses of yDNA and mtDNA, however, that makes these some of the most powerful tests you can take:

Geographical location

Unlike “ethnicity” estimates we see from all the major testers, yDNA and mtDNA can be very effective in pinpointing very accurately the location of your ancestors on the planet. The standard (Autosomal) DNA tests from Ancestry rely on a small global sample of historical DNA (16,000 samples currently), and human created Family Trees, to mathematically try and guess where our ancestors were 800-1000 years ago. They are looking for little shreds of DNA to trace back, and it’s very small amounts because Autosomal DNA gets cut in 1/2 for each side of a lin ever generation. However y/mtDNA doesn’t change over the generations and so we know very accurately where those ancestors were, based on where the bodies were found. This is especially important for African American genealogy, when there are nearly no records of origin before our ancestors were taken from Africa. These tests can be very accurate, and place your ancestral group in to very small physical and/or social (tribal) locations.

dna 6-ydna_migrationmap_(ftdna2006)
yDNA groups, and how they migrated over the centuries. From FamilytreeDNA.com.

Brick wall research

In our example above, we know for a scientific fact that Michael and Frank share an MCRA along their paternal line. The same is true for women who have an mtDNA match. While that again doesn’t help us much if we have no information, it’s invaluable if we have a good guess on how we’re related. Let’s go back to our DNA Painter walkthrough to see how we wish we had yDNA and mtDNA tests.

To recap from last week’s post, we have two lines of DNA tests that we know are connected, and we have narrowed down the MCRA for both a cluster of AncestryDNA matches and on our line, but we don’t know how they connect. So, we have two couples (Jacob/Maria Kupsch, and Joseph/Dorothy Haasl) that we know match, most likely 2-3 generations above them. Each of them have 8 potential match relatives, and we have 4 known relatives, so we’re facing 32 ancestors that might be our MCRA.

But, if we can confirm the y/mtDNA from those 4 relatives, whom all died over 100 years ago, because that DNA doesn’t change between generations. That means a direct male relative from Jacob (say his son’s, son’s, son’s, son’s DNA) will confirm Jacob’s yDNA. Same for Maria, and a direct female relative. If we could yDNA test relatives of both Jacob and Joseph, and mtDNA for both Maria and Dorothy we would have about a 25% chance of finding an immediate match. And, if say Maria and Dorothy share the same mtDNA we just figured out we need to focus our research only on both of their maternal lines to make our match. If we don’t find that match, we just eliminated 25% of our potential match points, so now instead of building out 32 ancestors to find our match, we’re down to 24. But even better, if we can go one level up and do the same thing, we can eventually narrow this down to where we share an MCRA.

Here’s a great blog post that breaks this down a real-world example from Roberta Estes: (Mitochondrial DNA Bulldozes Brick Wall)

xDNA

dna 6-gendmatch xGoing back to the GEDmatch installment of this series (How to make the most of your AncestryDNA matches: Part 4 – How to quickly, and effectively, use GEDmatch), there was a column in our DNA matches that showed the amount of xDNA that we matched other testers. The good news is that all of the major test kits include xDNA measurements in their most basic test. The bad news is, it’s unlike the other types we’ve talked about, and it’s almost useless. With one very valuable exception.

It would be highly unlikely we could ever build out a family match with xDNA, and the cM you share with someone tells you almost nothing about close of a match you are with them. The main value of xDNA is if you do match someone, it narrows down your link to that match in a very powerful way. xDNA is inherited in a unique pattern that going back several generations can eliminate more than 50% of your tree as a potential match.

Women will inherit an X chromosome from both their mother and their father, but men will inherit an X from only their mother. Going back to High School Biology, we quickly remembered that women have an XX chromosome, while men have XY!

But, the value for us comes in when we build out our potential ancestor’s chart, using that inheritance pattern. So, if we have a female test subject who has an unknown xDNA match, we know it’s not from her Father’s Father’s line because men only inherit their X from their mothers. Going back 2 generations, we just eliminated 25% of the potential matches. If you know, from other research, that this unknown match is on their father’s line, you just confirmed it’s on the father’s mother’s line.

dna 6-x-fan
xDNA inheritance chart, from DNAeXplained

You won’t see a lot of xDNA matches, but when you do, Google one of the many xDNA inheritance fan charts, and start to see if you can eliminate suspects in how you match. It could bring you much closer to where to hunt for your MCRA.

Here’s a great break down of xDNA from DNA Explained, with more links to more detail as well: (Who Tests the X Chromosomes)

Just know that all of this work will have to be in GEDmatch however, since AncestryDNA doesn’t provide any information on the details of your genetic matches, and none of the tools needed to view/manage this information.