Building it Yourself

 

Sometimes, ya just gotta build it yourself. Since I've been stuck on the origin of my second great-grandfather Alexander Boothe, I wondered whether following the lines of his two eldest sons might shed some light on where Alexander came from in Virginia, and who his first wife might have been. Quinton and David Boothe, supposedly born to that first wife, certainly were with their father when he arrived in Tennessee, so I have at least a toe-hold to climb their family tree—or build a descendancy tree to use in exploring DNA matches.

Turning to Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool to see what matches might already have been lined up for me, I saw that I'd be amply rewarded if I followed the eldest son Quinton's line, but for David, his younger brother, not one match was showing.

Quinton's line has been easy to follow, and I've actually been in touch with distant Booth cousins from that half-sibling to my own line's ancestor. It turns out that this was the family of whom my grandfather used to tell unverifiable wild tales about John Wilkes Booth—yes, the John Wilkes Booth—that he survived the manhunt following his assassination of President Lincoln and escaping to "a horse farm in west Texas." 

That farm in west Texas, incidentally, belonged to Quinton Booth's family. And apparently, that story was so widespread among Booth cousins that I actually got a phone call from someone wanting to exhume the body from the supposed burial site and use DNA testing to verify the identity of the person supposedly buried in John Wilkes Booth's grave.

For as much as we've known about the descendants of Quinton Booth, I don't know about his full brother David. Checking Ancestry.com ThruLines to see if there were any matches aligned to David's descendants, I was disappointed—but not surprised—to see there was not one DNA match attributed to that ancestor.

That is where the "build it yourself" comes in. If I build that branch into my tree, will ThruLines pick up the possibilities and point me to David Booth's descendants who have tested their DNA? That's what I'm hoping, but doing so will mean lots of work.

Sometimes, building out a DNA match's tree is the only way to verify connections. There are so many who test their DNA, yet never build—or post—their family tree so others can compare notes. For those of us convinced of the utility of genetic genealogy, we have to take that do-it-yourself approach.

In the case of this missing line of Alexander Boothe's progeny, it is certainly worth it for me to check out what can be discovered. Perhaps there is a cousin out there who does know the rest of the Boothe story, going all the way back to Virginia—not speculation, not information copied from someone else's tree, but actual records that will piece the story together and allow us all to take yet another step back through the generations.

Surveying the Document Landscape

 

Today is the start of RootsTech, so you can hardly expect me to focus on my own research when there are so many presentations to watch online. However, I did take some time to explore what documents could be found on this month's research predicament: finding the roots of my second great-grandfather Alexander Boothe.

Yesterday, we had explored the direct route of looking for all documents concerning Alexander, himself. Then, stretching our search one more step, we examined the father named in the death certificates of each of Alexander's children. Seeing the consistency gives me more confidence to discard the insertion of a first name of William, as some researchers had asserted.

There is, however, another inconsistency I've noticed in this saga of the migrating Boothe family. Supposedly, Alexander left his home in Nansemond County, Virginia, with his two sons after the death of their mother, arriving in Tennessee in time for the 1850 census. If that was the case, one would suppose the boys' father would report their place of birth as Virginia for that 1850 census—but that was not the case. Take a look for yourself at that record and notice that, while Alexander reported himself as having been born in Virginia, twelve year old Quinton and five year old David were marked as having been born in Tennessee, not Virginia.

Surely that must be a one-off error, you might be thinking. I did, too. So my next step was to look at all the other census records in which I could find either of those earlier two sons from the first marriage.

Searching for Quinton did not produce any helpful information. I have yet to find him in the 1860 census, though I did notice that someone by that same name enlisted in the Confederate Army in Texas in the early 1860s. Checking Quinton's children's death certificates for father's place of birth was not helpful, either. I found his son John's death certificate reported Quinton as having been born in Tennessee—but then daughter Sallie's death certificate showed Texas for her father's birthplace, and son William's informant gave his father's place of birth as Georgia.

It would have helped if Quinton had died just a little bit later than he did. Having breathed his last on January 6, 1908, that date fell at the beginning of the very year in which Texas instituted statewide registration of deaths. Unfortunately, Quinton's does not appear to be among those earliest of such a statewide format, else I'd be snatching it up to view not only the detail on his father's place of birth, but the name of his own mother.

Quinton's younger brother David Booth did not boost my confidence in that story about a Virginia birth for the boys. I was able to find David in each enumeration from the first census after his birth to the last census still existing before his 1899 death. Just as his brother had done, David eventually moved his family to Texas, so a death in 1899 meant his passing predated the modernized form of reporting which includes name and place of birth of each parent. Bottom line for David: every one of those enumerations listed his place of birth as Tennessee, not Virginia.

If those reports of place of birth in Tennessee were correct, that sticking point gives me reason to pause when considering the family story about Alexander Booth losing his wife in Virginia. Perhaps yet again that is a reason why this man has played the part of a brick wall ancestor. Maybe his story is far different than what some of us Boothe cousins had assumed.

Looking for the Stories Behind the Ancestors

 

Granted, not many of us know our own third cousins, personally. But this month, in researching the descendants of a newly-discovered branch of my father-in-law's Tully family, I found one I wish I had gotten to know. 

Dennis Tully, that Irish-born Canadian immigrant whose descendants showed up in my husband's DNA matches, unexplained, had a large family which included several daughters. One of them, named Johanna but preferring to go by Hannah for short, married a man by the name of Hugh Kane. They, in turn, settled in Stratford, Ontario, where they had a somewhat smaller family than the Tullys' own, the oldest of which Hugh and Hannah named Frederick Hugh Kane.

Frederick eventually married a Stratford gal named Lillian, from which followed at least eight children that I could find, with the last two being twins. While I have yet to determine part of their family story—Lillian seemed to be the strong influence in this household—I noticed a theme developing in the siblings' stories. They were all active—and one skill that they liked in particular was ice skating.

No surprise, here; they're Canadian. Plenty of opportunities to practice their hobby, eh?

I began seeing this trend as I read through the siblings' obituaries. When I got to one in particular, I found myself wishing I had had the opportunity to meet him in person. The memorial styled him as someone with roots in Canada, but there was so much more to say about the man. He was apparently a great storyteller, "never met a stranger" and "could learn everything about a person in the course of an elevator ride." Credited with "silent generosity," he served on his adopted city's parks and recreation board for eighteen years, after which the city named a park in his honor. At the close of the obituary, where typical "in lieu of flowers" statements are inserted, this one was different: "that you would do one spontaneous, unsolicited act of kindness for someone."

This Tully descendant alone, of all his siblings in the Kane family, had left Canada and settled in Texas, which might have explained the border crossing documents I was able to find. As it turns out, there was a reason for that, and it had to do with his love of skating. Actually, that love of skating brought him to cities across the North American continent, places like Detroit, Saint Louis, Tulsa, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Vancouver--as well as the Fort Worth area, where he eventually settled. As a professional ice hockey player, Francis J. Kane—or Red Kane, as he came to be called—played in 447 games from 1943 through 1951. While most of his games were played in the minor leagues, he did play for the major league Detroit Red Wings.

It was fun to find so many details about the life of this third cousin. More than just building out a family tree with bland names, places, and dates, I've always wanted to include the stories that seem to bring these people back to life again. Newspapers are one way to attempt getting the bigger picture, but sometimes that resource is as limited as the editorial policy in place in an ancestor's hometown paper. Granted, it is not every day that we find write-ups in Wikipedia under our relative's name—but sometimes, that rare occurrence can provide information as well as links to other resources about that family member. Sometimes, just googling the family member's name, or looking through old history books at Internet Archive can also provide resources for those stories we crave.

When we do find those unexpected stories, what a treasure they are. At the slightest hint that they might be out there, it's worth taking the time to go take a look. 

Don't Diminish the Dash

Sometimes, we get so absorbed with finding the vital details about an ancestor that we forget the little dash in the middle is the key to understanding just who those people were. The date of birth followed by the inevitable date of death become the bookends of a person's life, at least on a pedigree chart. We take great care in documenting each ancestor with those two identifiers—adding to that the date of a wedding and the increases in a family with the dates of each child born—until our pedigree charts look quite complete. What's missing, though, is the very detail that adds color to our family's picture.

I was reminded of that little dash between the vital dates while working on a behind-the-scenes project this week. Right now, I may be blogging about those family photos I've rescued from antique shops in Gold Rush country, but in the meantime, I'm piling on the details as I build my mother's southern family tree. Names, dates, documentation, for one and for all—and then I'm on to the next generation.

Somewhere while slogging through all this minutiae in my own family tree, I ran across an entry that caught my eye. It wasn't something that would fit nicely into a category of birth, marriage, or death, but I wondered about that detail and wanted to follow through.

The item was a simple mention of an occupation, listed in the census record. Admittedly, that is one of those "dash" kinds of details that help us learn more about what our ancestors were actually like, but I often give that entry just a cursory glance—in some cases, simply to make sure I have the right person by that name, instead of a mistaken identity.

In this case, the occupation listed was executor for an estate. In my mind, serving as executor is something we do for those dearly departed who held a significant relationship: a family member or close friend. Not exactly what I'd call an occupation, though all told, the effort can consume a great amount of time.

In this particular example, not only was the occupation listed, but for the column requesting the kind of business this service might have been classified under, this relative reported the actual name of the deceased.

Working back through the years, checking this relative's entries for each decade's enumeration, I realized the estate that consumed his time in the more recent census records was one and the same as the individual for whom he had worked, when the man was still alive. It became apparent that the reporting party expected that the name would be widely recognized—which made me curious to learn just who this man was, myself. He seemed to be involved in the oil industry in Houston, Texas.

Finally, the call of the dash—at least for this relative's story—got the best of me, and I succumbed to that nagging thought that I should at least look up my relative's name in some newspaper archives. Imagine my surprise to learn that at least this one person's dash—that tiny horizontal line separating his date of birth and date of death—filled the headlines in Houston newspapers, where he was being tried for complicity in what was billed as one of Houston's most notorious murder cases in memory.

Who would have known? Nothing in his routine documentation indicated anything of the sort. Other than the fact that he died relatively young, there was no birth, marriage, census or death record to lead me to suspect he was anything other than yet another "normal" American citizen.

After stumbling upon a detail like that, you can be sure I spent a lot of time reading up on the news from 1930s Houston. I wanted to know if he really "did it" and whether he got off free. I wanted to know what happened to his wife, his daughter—and what the rest of his family thought about it. And, barring restrictions of my own schedule, I can find out quite a bit of the proceedings, as the newspaper reporting was continuous and delved into the minute-by-minute details of each court session.

Granted, many of our ancestors led quiet (read: boring) lives, doing what they were supposed to do to raise a family and be a responsible member of their community. Such exemplary conduct seldom merits extensive coverage by the press. But for the occasional relative—and my maternal grandmother's line seemed to have more than their fair share of these black sheep—it is the newspaper records of past decades which can give us the detail we seek to fill in that little blank, that dash between the beginning and ending dates of our ancestors' lives.

Counting the Days 'til the Next Holiday DNA Sale

It's not the change of the season that puts me in the mood for Christmas, it's the need for another good holiday DNA sale. I've been looking over the count in DNA matches for the various tests I manage, and if there was a good turnout for the summer sales promotions, I can't tell.

Of course, I say that just as an anomaly strikes: I've finally gotten a contact from someone else. Rather than being the one who reaches out to my matches, last week, someone had contacted me. It was concerning my husband's results, but I'll be happy with any communication someone else initiates on this topic. The funny thing was...the only surnames I recognized in this match's tree were surnames belonging to me. I promise I've run our results through the one-to-one GEDmatch utility, and there is no sign we inadvertently married our own cousin, so these reoccurring surnames in his tree certainly have me puzzled.

Perhaps I'm wasting too much angst on such a tiny problem, something which I suspect comes from too little action on the DNA match front. I've noticed, lately, that in every two week period, each of our tests garners ten matches or less. Of course, there are exceptions. We're back to shrinking results at the ever-disappearing 23andMe, and on the other end of the spectrum, suspecting "funny money" status at MyHeritage, where my match count jumped 193 in just the past two weeks, and my husband's leapt by 163.

It would be nice if matches hadn't slowed to such a trickle—well, everywhere but at MyHeritage—which makes me long for a good holiday sale again. It's those descendants of elusive ancestors that I would most like to match up with. Doesn't everyone...

In the meantime, I keep at the more practical work of adding to our family trees. Remembering my focus on the southern roots in my mother's line, that's where the majority of my efforts have focused for two months, now, as I prepare for my southern research class at SLIG next January. So it comes as no surprise to realize that I added 145 names to my mom's tree in the past two weeks. The total there now stands at 14,886, and I'm finding lots of McClellan cousins that I had no idea even existed—especially in Texas!

As for my mother-in-law's tree, it has frozen at 15,703 individuals, and will likely stay that way for another half year. My father-in-law's tree managed to increase by a count of one, and I can't even remember why. It was likely on account of accidentally opening that tree, spotting a hint, and dispatching it before I realized I wasn't sticking to my resolution. Oh, well...that's the tree I really wish I could get back to, so I'm sure one more name won't hurt for now. Besides, nothing has happened on my own dad's tree, so I really am trying to stick to my resolve.

Sometimes, the routine work of genealogy can get dreary. It's simply a matter of finding documents to link to each person I add on that southern line, verifying each fact, then moving on to the next person. In the meantime, though, I am keeping a running list of questions that pop up and things I want to delve into, once I get to class next January. I figure I can't manage to ask any good questions if I don't let myself get stumped beforehand, so I am working my hardest to find a few stumbling blocks on this southern road of research. In the meantime, I'm finding some good stories...and busting a few other family legends in the process.

Keeping an Eye on the Goal

As much as I love delivering hundred-year-old family photos back to their rightful place—and we will return to that with a new episode tomorrow—behind the scenes, I am still chipping away at my own family mysteries. Still keeping my focus on my mother's southern lines, now that I'm home from my travels, I'm back at this project in earnest. After all, that SLIG class on southern research is drawing closer, and I want to be in the thick of things when it's time to pepper the instructor with questions.

Considering my return to work on this goal, it is likely no surprise to discover that, in the past two weeks, I've been able to add 236 names to my mother's family tree. Her tree now stands at 14,741 ancestors and related lines. I'm still working on the descendants from her McClellan ancestors, but after the Civil War, one branch had moved from their home in Florida to Texas, so I'm in a whole different kind of southern, now.

Despite my decision to focus my research on my mother's southern roots through next January, there are times in which I make a slight detour. In the past two weeks, that was again the case, only unlike the previous biweekly span, this time was owing to the discovery of the passing of a very distant relative on my mother-in-law's line. Thus, courtesy of a newly-discovered obituary, her tree expanded by thirty six people to total 15,703.

Wrapping up this two week period, it's no surprise to see that my dad's line is still stuck at 514—a number that likely won't change for a very long time—and my father-in-law's Irish-Chicago clan is still holding at 1,513.

I'm glad that the summer DNA sales at a number of the DNA companies will soon trickle down in the guise of an increased count in my DNA matches. Things have been progressing so slowly since the Father's Day sale wrapped up. It makes me wonder whether these companies have been conditioning their prospective customers to only buy when there is a sale. My match counts, as well as those for my husband, have increased by only a handful at each company in the past two weeks. And among those new names, most are distant cousins, at best.

Still, that's not to overlook the fact that AncestryDNA has quietly exceeded another ceiling, now having over ten million among those who have completed their DNA tests at Ancestry. And that's not to discount the thousands of DNA matches for which both I and my husband have already received notification. Furthermore, it's an encouraging sign for those I'm working with who are hoping to learn more about their family's past which has been obliterated by choices placing them in an uninformed position—unnamed parents whom they have never met are taking shape as real people, thanks to DNA, instead of the murky mysteries they previously had been. The more people who test, the greater the chance that these forsaken stories will be brought to light in the therapeutic way so desperately needed by those most impacted.

Meanwhile, besides these fun projects, I'm sticking to my goal: between now and my class in Salt Lake City in January, I'm working the southern angles on my mother's ancestry.