Ancestral weather

 

It's autumn on the West Coast. The sunny days of summer are over and we're heading into days, weeks, probably months of relentless rain. I've become used to the rhythms of the seasons in the years I've lived here. I also have a roof over my head and a furnace to keep me warm but in the past people were often more directly affected by the weather. 

Just think of the farmers and fishermen in your family line. They and their livelihoods would have been directly impacted by weather events where they were living, whether it was the cumulative result of weeks of rain or drought, or a disastrous weather event. Even city dwellers could be adversely affected by larger events. I know this well, having written about my grandfather's brush with the Regina Cyclone. But I wouldn't have know about that weather event if someone in a class that I was attending years ago hadn't brought it up.

After that I was able to find more information by looking at historic newspapers for the cyclone which devastated Regina in 1912. Books and online searches filled in more information. That's the thing about disasters, they catch people's attention and there are likely to be written accounts. They might also be the impetus for change in ancestor's lives, such as migration or an alteration in their day to day lives that brought them into contact with different people. I believe my grandfather met the woman he was to marry when he had to move after the cyclone left a path of destruction down the street he lived on.

Big weather events could change the lives of our ancestor but so too could the everyday effects of weather. Did they live in houses that barely contained the inhabitants as most work, even that of the womenfolk, happened outside? What happened when weather made staying outside a misery? Social history shows that the relentless day to day struggle of people living with only the bare necessities to keep them warm and dry during the hardest months of the year could also find this a spur in their quest for a better life. I've seen how one weather event affected my grandfather's life. Perhaps a look at the weather in other ancestors' lives might also add more to their stories

Finding gateways

 

                                                                                   Plymouth Colony 1622

In my last post I wrote about the book The Last Days of Richard III and the fate of his DNA. As I was still reading the book at the time I wrote the post, I had not yet tackled the chapters about identifying the body through DNA. I found those chapters fascinating. It was like a giant puzzle or genealogy in reverse. Because Richard III died in 1485, only mitochondrial or Y DNA could be used in the quest to identify the body. The DNA which follows the female line, mitochondrial or mtDNA, being the more reliable of the two as any disputes over parentage usually follow the male line. What the researchers needed to find was a line from a known female relative in Richard III's direct maternal line and follow that line through successive daughters to the present day, a painstaking in daunting task which the book highlighted. 

It reminded me of doing genealogy in reverse, working forward through the years from an ancestor who came earlier. The medieval time period this work took the researchers back to also brought to mind a breakthrough that a fellow volunteer at the BCGS library made. He had found his gateway ancestor, that elusive link to the known genealogies of the great and good, or at least those in the top rungs of the social hierarchy back in history. The people who actually got written up in records that far back. It reminded me that there was a rumour of one of those gateway ancestors on one of my family lines as well. Maybe it was time to look into it.

This possible gateway ancestor connects to my line of Tripps who lived in Rhode Island and Massachusetts in the early colonial days. It wasn't the Tripp family but the Cudworth family who married into that Tripp line which was rumoured to have the possible link that would take me much further back into history. As you can see by the fragment of my family tree up above, more than one Cudworth woman married into my Tripp family line, Jabez being one of my direct ancestors. In fact, Abigail and Elizabeth Cudworth were sisters and daughters of James Cudworth. James in turn was the son of Major James Cudworth, an early immigrant who held important offices in the Plymouth Colony. The elder James featured in Douglas Richardson's Magna Carta Ancestry Volume II which takes the Cudworth and many other Colonial lines back to the time of the signing of the Magna Carta. This would be perfect except that there appears to be controversy over the inclusion of James Cudworth the elder in this work. It seems the path to true genealogy is never a smooth one. 

Sources:

Ashdown-Hill, John. The Last Days of Richard III and the fate of his DNA. The History Press, Stroud, Gloucestershire, 2013.

Insurmountable problems with lineage of gateway James Cudworth? https://groups.google.com/g/soc.genealogy.medieval/c/5oEUwaUUZBI?pli=1

Richardson, Douglas. Magna Carta Ancestry Volume II https://books.google.vg/books?id=8JcbV309c5UC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_vpt_read#v=onepage&q&f=false

Image:

By Scan by NYPL - https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-8614-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47124218

Genealogy lessons from history

 

                                                                              Statue of Richard III in Leicester

My fascination with the story of Richard III was stoked by Josephine Tey's well known novel, The Daughter of Time, then went into overdrive with the identification of Richard's remains after they were discovered in 2012. This discovery and how the remains were identified interested me on so many levels. The history of this king was controversial and reached back into time. But the story was also up to date as present day methods were used to extract his remains and DNA was used to identify them. 

The fact that Richard's remains had been lost seemed odd to me. Had he been so reviled that they just slung him in the ground and covered him up? But the story was more convoluted than that. Think Henry VIII and the dissolution of the monasteries. History provided the explanation for the loss of Richard III's burial place and it is often history, the things that happened around and after the time frame of the ancestors we are researching, which can explain why some of those records we are desperately looking for can be found and others cannot.

Another lesson to be taken from Richard III's story is how it has been told over time. The story morphed and changed depending on the historian, their interpretation of whichever records they chose to focus on and the aspect of the story they wanted to tell. It wasn't only historian who entered their interpretation into history, politics often underwrote which versions of the story were handed down. But we do that with most histories, as the story we feel we must tell becomes the focus and contains the points we want to get across. When these stories are handed down through changing times there can be additions and parts of the tale that no longer meet our current mores can be expunged. 

I'm currently reading The Last Days of Richard III and the fate of his DNA which prompted my thoughts about history. I haven't yet read the DNA part of the book but hopefully it will spur on the exploration of my own genetic heritage. In the meantime, it will pay to remember the following points when researching my ancestors.

• Research the wider history of events contemporary and subsequent to target time period and records
• Lore handed down should be treated with caution 

Sources:

Ashdown-Hill, John. The Last Days of Richard III and the fate of his DNA. The History Press, Stroud, Gloucestershire, 2013. 

DNA update

 

DNA experts who are able to use the data in their tests and the tests of genetic relatives to explore their ancestry fascinate me. The latest webinars about the methods they use are so informative. I take notes and download handouts but somehow nothing really sinks in. It seems that this new genealogical tool is somewhat akin to math, either you grasp it or you don't. But still I plod along hoping that one spark will set me on the path to understanding.

Part of the problem, I think, is that I am a bit slap dash in my approach and a lot of what the experts teach is about being methodical, like tagging and sorting matches once you've looked at them. It seems like it would pay to invest some time and actually get down to sorting through my matches.

Getting them sorted is becoming more urgent. I now have more matches to look through since Living DNA increased the offerings on their database to show probable related testers. I was trawling through my Living DNA matches to see if there were any familiar names attached to the testers when I came across a name I recognized. The name was of someone I know to be a genealogy expert. If I was able to figure out the match, the information on their lines should take me back further. So I sent them a message.

They replied and we tried to find the connection. I sent a link to my tree on Ancestry and we looked to see if we matched on FT DNA and My Heritage. Nada. No matches anywhere else. I was disappointed but when I talked about it in the DNA group for my genealogy society, one of the experts in the group asked me where the matching centimorgans were. I didn't know that information as Living DNA doesn't have a chromosome browser yet but it gave me something to think about. Perhaps the mystery of that match is the spark that will ignite my DNA research. 

The lure of genealogical mysteries

 

I love a good mystery. Many of the books I read and shows I watch feature murder mysteries. Good ones draw you in and tantalize you with clues keeping you guessing who done it. Most of these stories are fiction but real life mysteries keep us striving for solutions too. Mysteries like what happened to Amelia Earhart or to the Franklin Expedition inspire people to propose their pet theories about what happened.

Reading Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven, reminded me of one of the mysteries in my own family history, that of how Tom Thomson died. Strange how the uncertainty around his death keeps his memory alive. That mystery has spawned many books about Thomson, his promise as an artist cut down in his prime and speculation as to whether his death was an accident or murder.

But it's not only the well-known mysteries that drive my family research. Others fascinate me as well. For one, where in Ireland did my family come from? But that's a big question involving a whole branch of the family. I find the more intriguing mysteries are the ones that involve individuals. Like just how did the last member I've traced in one branch of my Arments end up with so much money to leave in his will? Since that was the family where a father and son a few generations previous had been sentenced for receiving stolen goods, I find the final sum to be willed an intriguing mystery.

Another puzzle involves a birth in Ashmore, a village in Dorset where my Rideout family lived. Thomas Rideout, my 2X great grandfather, was a relatively young man when he died in 1842 leaving my 2X great grandmother, Mary, alone to raise their children. She never remarried but her last child was born a few years after Thomas' death. I'm sure it was an open secret who the father was. It was a very small village. Try as I might I haven't yet found the answer to that son's paternity. Not that it affects my own line as I'm a descendant of one of the children born when Thomas was alive. Still, the mystery beckons.