Reaching Out

 

The connections we can gain from DNA testing gift us with the ability to reach out to strangers and meet them as family. This weekend, I had the opportunity to do just that. 

Most of us might have had the opportunity to meet first cousins once removed—those family connections some of us, before genealogy, might have called "second cousins." Some of us actually do know our second cousins. Beyond that, though, very few have a personal relationship with third cousins or beyond.

One member of our local genealogical society has found a way to break through that barrier—he simply reaches out to distant DNA matches, strikes up a conversation online, and eventually makes plans to meet up with them in person. We've been regaled with his stories over the past few years. Whether that has proven to inspire anyone else's action, I don't know. But when I had a chance to fly to a distant city this weekend, I couldn't bypass the opportunity: I asked a third cousin, once removed, if she would be interested in connecting in person.

On the surface, it took not much more than a twenty mile drive to a unique coffee shop halfway between our two locations—well, after a four hour flight cross country—but beneath that simplicity was months of email exchanges, comparing notes on cousins in common, placing mutual DNA matches in their correct position on the family tree we share. We are, after all, both researchers keen on uncovering our mystery ancestors.

When we realize the power of the tools we have at hand for building our family trees, it is sometimes lost on us that that same ability can draw us closer together, personally. In my case, this relative connects to my paternal grandfather's mystery Polish roots—the back story of the life of a relative I never met face to face, a man intent on keeping his ethnic origin a well-concealed secret.

This was a chance to share observations of what details we knew about family, discovering in conclusion that perhaps those ancestors simply had no desire to ever think again about the life they left behind in their choice to emigrate. Unlike, say, the Irish who could never forget the beautiful—though ravaged—homeland they left behind, the Polish in our roots left a life perhaps deemed not even deserving of remembrance. At least for our family's journey to a new world, that consideration was left by the wayside.

Granted, any such meet-up between two strangers, even those who share genetic connections, can turn up full of energy—or lacking any compulsion to continue the relationship. In our case, we could have talked for hours longer.

In retrospect, though, this was a conversation begun months ago, just a chance to move the interactions to a different venue. Thinking back to the role model of my fellow genealogy society member—someone we've dubbed everybody's cousin—that was not a bad example to follow. In this case, it was certainly worth the time to make this connection, and to hope for many more to come.  

When Favorite Names Keep Appearing

 

While seeking the right Miller ancestor for our Lydia has led us into a maze of possibilities, one DNA match who pointed us to an ancestor named Joseph Miller came with a bonus: a son whose name has appeared often in Miller households. That favorite name was Solomon. 

From the Miller families we've already examined, the given name Solomon has been part of the household of Jonathan Miller, as well as that of someone named Michael Miller. This Michael Miller happened to marry a woman whose surname—Binkley—had surfaced when I considered this Miller puzzle a year ago. I'm beginning to see the formation of a family cluster. 

Yet another Miller had the fingerprints of being part of a set of extended relatives in Perry County, Ohio. And here was this other family, also preferring to name their son by that same name, Solomon.

Seeing the selection of a specific name repeated over generations in households of the same surname, living in the same location may be telling us something. Or maybe that's just the kind of "something" that I've been hoping to listen to more closely.

This new DNA match, though, was connected to someone named Joseph Miller. There was one more problem with that: from all indications, his residence was not situated in the usual spot in Perry County. In fact, he was said to have been a long-time resident of Whitley County, Indiana.

Yet, following the trail of other researchers—especially those generous ones who share their path so that others can check out their conclusions—I discovered some helpful supporting narratives. While I have yet to find an online resource for the particular biographical sketch this researcher provided, reading the century-old narrative told me Joseph wasn't as far removed from the Perry County Millers as I might have expected.

It was worth checking out those details. First, of course, I tried replicating the search this researcher had shared on Ancestry.com, but without success. There was apparently more than one book called History of Whitley County, Indiana. I did, however find information on Joseph Miller in a similarly-named publication, embedded within a biography of someone named Benjamin Hively.

Gleaning the basics of Joseph Miller's family history may prove helpful. Using these publications as guide, we may learn more about a collateral line to the Jonathan Miller we've already been examining. If families of that era migrated in family clusters, that might indeed be helpful in sorting out the puzzle of this month's focus, my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother, Lydia Miller. Whoever her parents were, they surely migrated westward to Ohio in the company of many others—likely, members of an extended Miller family. We'll take a closer look at these details next week.

Yet Another Miller

 

Among the DNA matches isolated to point solely to a Miller ancestor connected to our Lydia in Perry County, Ohio, some linked to an ancestor named Joseph Miller. A cursory glance at this Joseph Miller showed a man born in 1801. Hmmm, I thought: a year of birth close enough to perhaps link him as a brother to the Jonathan Miller we've been watching.

So much for numbers. Even if this Joseph were born in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, as we had suspected for Jonathan, he certainly didn't die in Ohio. A link in the DNA match's tree led to a Find A Grave Memorial for a man who died in Fulton County, Indiana. Not the same story as what we've seen for Lydia or Jonathan.

One tiny detail in a life story doesn't provide the full picture, of course. As it turns out, this Joseph may well have made a stop in Ohio on his way to Indiana, after all. Joseph Miller apparently married his wife, Barbara Overmyer, in none other than Perry County. Surprisingly, the entry for their wedding is displayed on the same page as that for Jonathan Miller and Catharine Dupler, occurring just one month before the other Miller ceremony, on March 18, 1824.

That was enough to beguile me into following more of Joseph Miller's story. After all, there was a promising Joseph Miller listed among those thirty five Miller heads of household listed in Perry County in the 1830 census. Perhaps this was the one.

Many Millers

 

Continuing the quest for a possible Miller father for our Lydia, we have many Millers from which to choose. And I don't mean a choice from among the many Millers resident in the state of Ohio—although the Miller surname does happen to be one of the top three surnames in that state. Back in 1830, the first census taken after Lydia was born, there were at least thirty five heads of household in Perry County, Ohio, claiming that surname.

Although it was possible that Lydia's immediate family might not have stayed in Perry County—after all, as we've already seen, some Millers came from Somerset County, Pennsylvania, and could just have kept on traveling—I'm hoping that gleaning information from this one snapshot of 1830 might give a chance at discovering members of Lydia's immediate Miller family.

In tandem with a search through the Perry County Millers of 1830, I am reviewing the rest of the DNA matches tying my husband to candidates with Miller roots. To continue this search in a way that would yield meaningful results for our search for Lydia's parents, we need to remember some details:

• The Miller DNA match must represent a line which is not intertwined with the many other surnames in Perry County which have, over the centuries, intermarried with my mother-in-law's family.
• The potential match would need to be someone who could be identified, placed within the context of a family tree, and verified by documentation—thus, no enigmatic labels replacing match names.
• The tree needs to convey a reasonable story: no wild migrations over hundreds of miles of rough terrain in a matter of days; no births to teenaged couples barely old enough to parent children; no unexplained surname changes or other fingerprints of confused identities.

I have already found six DNA matches at Ancestry who all descend from Jonathan Miller and his wife, Catharine Dupler. Since then, I've located almost as many more Miller matches satisfying my prerequisites, but who descend from a different Miller ancestor. The challenge now is to build out trees for those matches, confirm the assertions, and watch to see where the Miller nexus might occur between our Lydia and the DNA match's ancestor.

This, as you can imagine, will be a time-consuming process.... 

Supposed Siblings and Their Possible Patriarch

 

I confess: I cheated. This wearying search for possible siblings and parents of my mother-in-law's brick wall ancestor Lydia Miller has nigh worn me out. So when I spotted an Ancestry hint that perhaps Lydia's possible sibling Jonathan Miller was son of a man named Henry Miller, I decided to check it out. 

Since Jonathan was said to have been born in Pennsylvania—at least, according to his Find-A-Grave entry—it made sense to look for such a father both in Jonathan's home in Perry County, Ohio, and for his supposed home town back in Pennsylvania.

Checking the 1830 census in Perry County, Ohio, however, led me nowhere. That was the first census in which Jonathan had appeared in Ohio after his 1824 marriage to Catharine Dupler, but the significant number of Miller residents in 1830 in Perry County told me the search might be challenging. Besides, the lone Henry Miller in Perry County that year, himself a man under forty, turned out to be far too young to have been father of Jonathan, himself born in 1802.

The suggestion at Ancestry, however, was to check out a Henry Miller still residing in Pennsylvania. While on its surface, a card transcribed from Mennonite Church records, offered up as documentation of Henry Miller by Ancestry hints, seemed plausible as father of Jonathan—and thus, possibly, of our brick wall ancestry Lydia Miller.

Plausible, that is, until a closer look revealed that that Henry Miller couldn't possibly have been father of Lydia. If Lydia's own burial record contained the correct age, her date of birth would have been in 1820. Pennsylvania Henry, according to the card gleaned from Mennonite records, had died by 1812. Indeed, one Henry Miller, dying intestate in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, became subject of a court appointment of administrators late in that same year.

While this Henry might well have been father of Jonathan Miller, he certainly couldn't have filled those same shoes for Lydia. It's back to the drawing board for another hypothesis on just who Lydia's father might have been.

Six Miller Descendants

 

Six DNA tests reveal a distant cousin with a connection to a Miller ancestor from Perry County, Ohio. Each of those Miller connections shares a slight match with my husband's DNA test at Ancestry.com. But rather than leading back to Lydia Miller, my husband's direct line ancestor, each one of these matches points in a different direction: to someone named Jonathan Miller.

This Jonathan Miller, said to have been born in 1802 in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, spent most of his adult life in a different Somerset: in Perry County, Ohio. There, in 1824, he married Catharine Dupler, and began raising his family.

It was not lost on me last year as I explored possible family members related to Lydia Miller that Jonathan Miller was a close neighbor to Lydia and her first husband, William Gordon. Now, discovering that six direct line descendants of Jonathan Miller are DNA matches to my husband, a descendant of Lydia Miller, seems to confirm my hunch that those two ancestors must have been closely related. I just can't tell yet how close that relationship was.

Five of those six DNA matches claim Jonathan Miller as their fourth great-grandfather. The additional match is one generation closer, showing Jonathan as a third great-grandfather. None of the matches shares more than twelve centiMorgans of genetic material with my husband—a tiny one-segment match, indeed. 

The six matches descend from three of Jonathan's daughters. Two descend from eldest daughter Belinda Miller, two from Barbara Miller, and two from Catherine Miller.

There are three more DNA matches connected to Jonathan Miller for which I am still building out their line of descent. I suspect there will be more yet to find, as I build out Jonathan Miller's tree over multiple generations.

The obvious next question is: how is our Lydia related to Jonathan Miller? There is obviously some sort of family connection. Since Jonathan was said to have been born in 1802, and Lydia in 1820, my guess would be that the two were siblings. Despite the wide spread between those years of birth, it is not uncommon to see siblings in a large family with such a disparity in ages.

The next task, then, is to discover what can be found to confirm the identity of Jonathan's father.

Avoiding "Endogamy Lite"

 

If there is any difficulty in comparing DNA matches from my mother-in-law's family, it is that the folks claiming a heritage in Perry County, Ohio, can often be related to each other in several ways. Far more closely connected than one would expect from pedigree collapse, they are not exactly poster children for endogamy, either. That's why I like to call this scenario a case of "endogamy lite"—only about half the calories, er, connections you'd expect in any endogamous population. And in this month's research case, I need to avoid those "endogamy lite" relationships like the plague.

The beauty of these tiny DNA matches I've recently discovered is that they are isolated to only one surname matching my mother-in-law's inter-related family lines. That name is Miller. With many of our other Perry County DNA matches, a closer look almost always reveals connections to several shared surnames, making it difficult for me to answer my research question for this month concerning Lydia Miller's roots. Those multiple surnames have been intertwined into this family for generations—but not, thankfully, in the case of these newly-discovered Miller DNA matches.

This opportunity gives me a chance to view Miller connections, isolated from the other intermarried lines. So far, I've found six such matches, and I'm working on confirming three more. Unfortunately, since these are all matches found on Ancestry.com, I have no way to extract the raw data and paint the chromosomes, unless I encounter six very willing strangers who are game to allow me to deeply explore their test results—something I'm not even going to attempt.

According to one Miller collaborator I've been working with—someone, by the way, who is related to my husband through multiple family lines, thanks to "endogamy lite"—there are several more Miller DNA connections to be found on the other testing services. Another task for me to do will be to explore what this collaborator has found at those other sites.

I suspect, however, that my husband's test yields more Miller connections than does my collaborator's test. Using Ancestry.com's ProTools, I checked for shared matches between the six Miller tests I've identified and my collaborator's test. There are no matches in common. Granted, this collaborator could have inherited totally different strands of Lydia's DNA than my husband has, yet another reason to continue comparing notes.

Looking at the trees of these six Miller matches found so far is informative. We'll explore a bit more of those connections next week.