When searching for family links, researchers rely heavily on surnames. But are surnames as reliable as we think? I ran into something the other day that made me question that.
I signed up for Diahan Southard's Your DNA Guide Study Group and this week we had our first class. We did a more in-depth dive into Ancestry's ThruLines than I've ever done. Not that that's saying much. I hadn't done more that get my toes wet with that tool before.
ThruLines uses DNA plus family trees to bring up likely scenarios for how you connect to your DNA matches. That's a good argument for why I should expand my family tree. But when I clicked on my great-grandmother, Charlotte Arment, I noticed something. I'd only added the children of her second husband to my tree. I say husband but I've never found a marriage between Charlotte Arment and Henry Cavanagh. That's probably because they never wed as she was still married to her first husband, John James Petherick, who was still living. Divorce was not an easy option in those days.
The problem was that I hadn't entered Charlotte's marriage to John James Petherick or her child from that relationship, William James Petherick, on my family tree. Without the Petherick information, some interesting DNA matches came up in ThruLines. Without the first marriage entered, William James Petherick/Cavanagh was my possible match, Charlotte's first child with the addition of her second husband's surname.
A check of the 1881 census shows that the conflation of the two surnames was easily done. At 82 Wentworth Street in Whitechapel, Henry Cavanah was listed as head of household, Charlotte as his wife and William, at the age of 16, as son. Henry and Charlotte's other children, Charlotte, Ellen, Nat and Jane followed as did Henry's mother-in-law, Ellen Armond.
By 1891 the family at 82 Wentworth Street had expanded into different units in the building. The census showed Charlotte's sister, Mary A Wright, with her children in the first unit. In the next unit were Henry and Charlotte Cavanagh and their offspring. Next door there appeared to be an unrelated couple, William McArthur and his wife Mary R. Living in the unit next to that couple, was W. James Petherick (our William James, son of Charlotte who was now Henry's wife). W. James Petherick was a widower of 26, living with his daughter Alice, aged 7 and his sister, Jane, aged 11. Was his sister, Jane, looking after his daughter? It was interesting to see all of these relatives living close together, an illustration of close East End family ties.
I was left with a favourable impression of Henry Cavanagh's character especially with what I know about the later history of the family. William James probably thought of him as his father, in deed if not in fact. The problem was that ThruLines brings together genetics with family trees and some of my possible matches through William J Petherick carry the surname Cavanagh and have for generations. As any matches on William J's line would be half relationships to me the amount of centimorgans would be different than that of a full relationship which a researcher might look for given the common surname of Cavanagh. Not only that, the ease with which one surname changed to another makes me wonder if it happened anywhere else in my family tree, perhaps on the Cavanagh family line which showed a propensity to mess about with surnames.
Sources:
Ancestry.ca DNA ThruLines
Find My Past 1881 census for London,
St Mary Whitechapel
LDS film 6095389 1891 census for
London, St Mary Whitechapel
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