The D N A Holiday Sales Bubble

 

Every winter, the holiday DNA sales result in a slight bubble of matches trailing through the months of January and February, due to the weeks-long processing time at the labs for new DNA tests. I always look for those results to arrive, since by the end of the year, the one or two—maybe five, if I'm lucky—matches that had dribbled in before that point for each of my biweekly counts seemed rather lackluster. January brings the first results of a fresh collection of family history experimenters eager to discover more about their roots through genetic genealogy.

For my biweekly count in the first half of January, I actually received thirteen new matches—a big jump in possibilities for me. The second half of the month brought another eleven. Even December's earliest holiday sales matches (perhaps a jump on the action with a Thanksgiving gift?) provided enough new material that when I checked on the results last night, I discovered I was farther behind than usual in doing my due diligence on that aspect of incoming data. It was high time to get to work.

First step was to filter my DNA matches by checking the box labeled "New." Then, I scrolled through the list, looking for two details: size of the shared genetic material, measured in centiMorgans, and whether there were any familiar surnames in the list.

Almost right away this time, I spotted a familiar surname, did a little research and plugged that new match into my extended tree. Mind you, this "bushy" family tree, full of descendants of collateral lines, was built exactly for this purpose, and it has been a project I've been working on since first DNA testing family members in 2013.

Every two weeks, I track my progress on building out the family trees used for this DNA purpose. For instance, in the past two weeks, I've added 173 documented individuals to my mother's line, bringing the total count on my tree to 39,134 relatives. While I haven't worked much on my in-laws' tree lately, I did add twenty eight names there in the past two weeks, thanks to work on DNA matches. That tree now has 37,367 people. So with those data sets, it becomes easier to spot the right place to plug in a new DNA match.

Along with that work, I try to make a connection with the DNA match personally, either by sending a message or, in cases of closer relationships, connecting in more personal ways. I've gained a few more friends on social media, a couple via direct email exchanges, and a few more by actually connecting in person.

It won't be long and the holiday sales bubble will shrink back down to the typical one to two DNA matches I receive every two weeks. A rate that glacial doesn't yield exciting surprises or incredible research breakthroughs, but even a little increase can add up.

Considering what I've been finding in the last month, though, I can't help but say that I can't wait until Christmas again to see what the next holiday sale might bring.

Someone Else's New Year

 

Last night, someone was pounding a drum in our neighborhood in celebration of the New Year. I can't exactly tell you which New Year is being celebrated right now, but it's someone else's celebration for a New Year from an entirely different calendar, the lunar calendar. While it could be the Chinese New Year, it could also be New Year for the Vietnamese, or the Koreans—or any of the other Asian roots claimed by my neighbors.

Living in a place which has been called one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the United States, it's not hard to gain an appreciation for the fact that different people celebrate differently, work differently, follow different customs and habits, even prefer different foods. But after we've lived here for a while, those differences seem to fade. First, perhaps, it's "fusion" cuisine which celebrates a blending of the old and the new, but eventually, we end up forgetting our roots. It's only been a few generations for me, but I couldn't tell you which holidays my paternal grandfather's Polish forebears celebrated, or even which foods they liked to eat on those festive occasions.

Perhaps that's what has brought about this call to re-discover our roots, to find out where we came from and what it was like to be not-American, to reach beyond hyphenated-American status to the rank of strangers from a strange land. For many people, the search doesn't involve more than a few generations.

For this coming month, though, my own search will diverge from that international research path to one which kept leading me back through local American documents. From generation to generation, sure the path skirted the borders and stepped just beyond civilization—but it did still tie my maternal line to American property. It's just when the paper trail grows dark, the going gets rougher. While I yearn to detect some signal of where this family originated, I keep missing the message.

February's goal for my Twelve Most Wanted will seek to find the roots for one of my third great-grandmothers, Delaney Rosella Townsend. When I last traced her back as far as I could in time, I found her in one of the least likely situations: young, single, and far from the supposed home of her parents. If it weren't for the one census record where I was able to find her, I wouldn't even have known where her parents supposedly lived. But this time is a new year, and a new opportunity to see that changed. This month is the time to trace that obscured route back home. 

End of the Line

 

With the end of this month, I face relinquishing my chase to push forward the end of the line of my second great-grandmother, Sarah Catherine Laws. While the month did lead me to many resources—and almost convincingly point me to North Carolina native William Laws as her father—I still haven't located any documentation to confirm the connection.

Several details seem to push me toward accepting that as my conclusion. For one thing, after Sarah Catherine married Thomas Davis, their young family appeared in the 1870 census on the same page as William Laws and his household. If the family were of Irish descent, I might consider as a strong clue the fact that Thomas Davis named his first-born son after his own father, James, while the second-born son was named William—after his mother's father? As far as I can tell, that would not be the case for the Davis family's ethnic background, with Davis being Welsh. Sometimes, coincidence may seem to finger truth; I'm not sure which way to view this one.

Since this search entailed tracking people born during a time period and in a region in which local governmental record keeping of that sort was not instituted until long after their passing, I had hoped to find a family Bible containing personal verification. Serendipitously for me, genealogist and blogger Lisa Lisson recently posted an article on that very topic, as well as the transcription of her podcast on that same subject, providing me with some additional resources to consider.

I've already done a good deal of searching for such resources, but now I've found more possible places to look. I began thinking that if I could find a Bible belonging to William's parents with mention of this specific son plus his siblings, that might also aid in further research, so I looked up places to find old Bibles back in North Carolina. Fortunately, a collaboration of the State Library and the State Archives of North Carolina gave me a place to start my search in William's home state.

Lacking results in North Carolina, I moved on to William's adopted home in Tennessee. I looked everywhere, from a list of links regarding Greene County from the Tennessee Genealogical Society, to the page on Greene County from the Tennessee GenWeb site, and even went back to the FamilySearch.org wiki page for Greene County, just in case I missed anything from the first time.

Though I've come up empty-handed this month, I'll be back to revisit this research question in a future year. Formulating my to-do list for next time, I'll have these blog posts and links to refer back to, as well as the electronic sub-folder I've made in my genealogy file. The most frustrating part of this exploration is that I ran across an email mentioning a Laws Bible, but of course now I can't locate that note. There is one out there somewhere, but until I can find the current owner, it's as good as lost to me.

The main consolation, through all this month's research, is the DNA indication that I share some sort of genetic relationship with William Laws' two sons. Whether this implies a direct line with William as father of Sarah Catherine as well as the two sons, I can't yet say. Let's just close out this month by saying I may not be there yet, but I'm closer now than I was before to closing in on my research goal.

Keeping an Eye on Elijah

 

If my suspected third great-grandfather William Laws had lived next door to a man with the same surname who was aged over twenty years older, I'd say it might be a safe bet to assume the two were father and son. Risky, I know, since I don't yet have any documentation to show for my guess—but that means it's time to go looking for any such records.

While the two men lived in Yancey County, North Carolina, during the enumeration of the 1850 census, taking my question to FamilySearch Labs Full Text search with those details did not produce much helpful information. I tried linking the two names together, but while there were several hits for my query, none of them produced records in Yancey County.

Remembering the shifting borders of ever-evolving counties in the 1800s, I checked for history on Yancey County's formation. The county, it turns out, was created in 1833. If William himself was forty eight at the time of the 1850 census, I reasoned that there was plenty of time beforehand for William and Elijah to show up in records prior to 1833.

Based on that, my next step was to check what county or counties gave up territory that resulted in the newly-formed Yancey County: Burke County and Buncombe County. Back to the FamilySearch Labs to check for any records in either of those counties—nothing for Burke County, and in Buncombe, one sole mention of an Elijah Laws in the land description for a grant dated 1819. Signs of our Elijah? Hard to say at this point.

While there were no other mentions of Elijah Laws in those two counties, there were several mentions of an Elijah Laws in Wilkes County, including a summons to appear as a witness at the county courthouse in 1805. While Wilkes County was not exactly adjacent to the future Yancey County, it was nearby in the western portion of the state.

More to my purpose, though, was how reminiscent this find was of the results of my searches for William Laws, supposedly Elijah's son, in which William's own sons seemed to be always just one step ahead of local law enforcement before they finally slipped over the line into Tennessee.

With the end of January coming quickly to a close—and thus my time to tackle this research question any further—I'll add this to my ongoing to-do list for further research in a future year. Perhaps by then, more documents will be digitized, making it somewhat easier to locate the right Elijah Laws to determine if he and William Laws were indeed related—and how.

One Last Walk Around the Neighborhood

 

This may sound nostalgic, but how about one more walk around the neighborhood before we say goodbye to William Laws and his family? After all, one last look at William's F.A.N. Club, back in Yancey County, North Carolina, in 1850 might not hurt—and besides, I've got no other leads to follow at this point.

I've spent the month seeking leads on the possible parents of my second great-grandmother Sarah Catherine Laws. Though she spent her married life in Tennessee—mostly in Washington County and Unicoi County after its establishment—she was likely born in North Carolina. 

Fancy that! That's the same as William Laws, ancestor of some of my distant DNA matches. It's time to rewind the family history back to 1850 and take a look at the page where the Laws family's census entry showed up in Yancey County.

Last time I did that, I was more concerned with taking a glance across the Laws timeline from decade to decade in the census enumerations. Thus, I found the family moving from Yancey County across the state line to Washington County, then Carter County, and finally settling in Greene County, Tennessee.

What I missed in that quick overview, though, were the family, associates, and neighbors William Laws connected with, back in Yancey County in 1850. One look now and I can see he was surrounded by family in the place where he lived. Whether close relatives or distant—I hear that in the South, they call them "kin"—there were a lot of Laws surnames on the same page where William was listed. The household listed right above William's was that of sixty nine year old North Carolina native Elijah Laws. Along with a fifty year old woman Anna Laws, who was likely his wife, there was an eighty four year old woman named Judith Bennett, and three young men, all surnamed Ayres. My guess is that Anna may have been Elijah's second wife and a widow, being the mother of the three young Ayres men.

Not much farther up the census page from Elijah's household was an entry for another Ayres couple—Anna's brother-in-law and his wife?—in between Elijah's household and that of twenty three year old James Laws. Could James be another relative? Following those lines and building out a test tree might reveal some connections with our William Laws. Elijah was certainly of an age to have been father of a first-born William.

It's always worth the effort to test out family history hypotheses—but to do so, we'll need to access  supporting documentation. Whether I'll have the time to do so before the end of this month, I'm not yet sure. If nothing else, this is a good time to construct my to-do list for the next time I revisit this research question about my second great-grandmother's heritage.

Time to Wrap Up

 

It's wrap up week for goal number one of my Twelve Most Wanted for this year, and I haven't found much to write about. The end of the line for my Laws family still appears to be my second great-grandmother, Sarah Catherine Laws Davis.

Well, take that back. I do have some tiny DNA matches with several descendants of a man from Greene County, Tennessee, known as Larkin Laws, and a couple token DNA matches with Larkin's brother Pine Dexter Laws. 

Those matches point to a father for the brothers—and possibly Sarah Catherine, too—known as William Laws. But I'm still not really sure. Tiny shared segments of DNA could mean those matches are my fourth cousins—or they could mean more distant relationships, at least according to the Shared CentiMorgan Project. For all I know at this point, Larkin and Pine Dexter could be cousins of Sarah Catherine, not brothers.

With only three more days to work on this puzzle, there aren't many research options left before I need to move on to February's goal. I could go back to those DNA matches whose ThruLines results at Ancestry.com do not match the lines of descent I've been able to replicate through documentation, and try building their tree from the current generation backwards in time. In leading me to the right ancestor, that may help tie Sarah Catherine's as yet unknown parents to the right family group.

I'm still working on building the trees downward for Larkin and Pine Dexter, still waiting for a telltale obituary or newspaper headline to point me in a more useful direction. Searching through newspaper collections online for articles including the Laws family names might still yield some helpful answers. And I'm still poking around for other local resources to explore.

All told, though, at this point I'm not expecting any revealing breakthroughs. But doesn't it seem that it's always the last place we look where we find what we've been looking for?

The Whodunit Drive

 

I can't say this statement is genetically verifiable, but it's obvious many humans have a "whodunit" drive embedded in their DNA. We need to find out who did it, get to the punch line, discover the answer. We can't abide the vacuum of uncertainty.

I watched a brief video positioned at the end of a recent blog post by Seth Godin. The video took all of about three and a half minutes—yes, I said minutes, not hours—and the ending made me literally laugh out loud.

The introductory blog post—brief, in quintessential Godin style—was about choosing to learn and why we choose not to learn. The end of the post segued nicely into the YouTube video, an unedited version of his talk given at TED2014.

The talk (spoiler alert here) asked, "It is a note worth playing?" As Seth Godin began his monologue, he pulled a clarinet out of its case and assembled it, all the while discussing a mindset of determining that if something is worth doing, it is worth doing exceptionally. Clarinet in hand—and almost before the audience realized it was over—he concluded his remarks as he turned his back on the audience and exited the stage, never once having played a single note on his now at-the-ready instrument.

I laughed because I just witnessed a brilliant object lesson. He had our attention because we were waiting for his demonstration. 

The demonstration never came.

The other shoe never dropped.

He left us in mid-sentence, thought-wise, waiting to hear what should have happened next.

And with that disequilibrium, our only resolution is to fill in the blank. Finish the sentence for ourselves.

That's not education. That's learning.

I just spent an entire day at a genealogy seminar hosted by a D.A.R. chapter in an ocean town I often enjoy visiting. The many speakers presented useful material—I focused here mostly on technology tools and techniques—but if I don't go home and put that newfound knowledge to use on my own research projects, I will really have learned nothing.

Right now, we have entered a genealogical season of learning. Of worldwide attention right now is the approaching annual RootsTech conference in early March. Following on the heels of that event, another virtual family history seminar hosted by the African American Genealogy Society will feature Renate Yarborough Sanders. Just over a week later, the Jewish Genealogical Society at our state's capital—Sacramento—will feature a case study by Steve Morse. And rumor has it that another genealogical society in that same city—Root Cellar—has two notable guest speakers on their spring lineup: Daniel Horowitz from MyHeritage in March, and Judy Russell ("The Legal Genealogist") in May.

Some season of learning opportunities—but only if we put the education we've gained to personal use.