Following the Threads of Family Lines Back to Many Places

Sometimes family lines are as hard to follow back to their origins 

as untangling a ball of thread

Before I started delving further into my family's past, I had the mistaken notion that, in the past, generations of people lived and died in one village and that only some moved any distance away where they once again put down roots for the family generations that followed. If this was the case then genealogy would be a search for places from which my family rarely budged. I couldn't have been more wrong. As I recently read when doing research on my Colonial American lines, "The truth is that there had always been much more going and coming in early America than the chroniclers have conceded."1 And it wasn't just in early America that this was true.

Although it did make sense that people would move around more in the new world. Their ties with the old country were weaker and the attachment to the new lands wasn't as strong so their moves in the new land weren't as surprising. My Matheson family from Skye moved in a way that I wasn't expecting, however. After settling close to his twin brother, Murdock, in PEI, my 3 x great-grandfather, Kenneth, moved to Ontario with his family. Why did that happen? The subsequent moves west in Ontario were explained by a general migration to the west as new land opened up. The next generations of the family continued the westward drift, going as far as Regina before retrenching to Winnipeg. Well, except for my great-grandfather and great-grandmother who decided to move to Selinas in California towards the end of his life. Why did he do that?

It looks like I have some research to do to better understand the lives of my ancestors in North America, particularly focusing on where and why they moved. But it wasn't only the family in the new world who didn't stay put. I have been able to find information back to the mid-1700s for one of my families who were in Northamptonshire, well, at least for a time. It appears that the family also had ties to Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire and some of them lived for a while in Kent. Their moves seem to be connected to their religious nonconformity. At least, that is something to look into when I look into that line again.

Some of that nonconformist line also ended up in London. But then, London was a big draw. I have more than one family line with links to the Big Smoke. They came from all over drawn to the magnetic big city and there they mixed with one another to create a confused lines that look like a tangled ball of thread. Each time I pluck a family thread to follow it takes me back to a different place, most of which are in England but the one thread that I would dearly like to follow would take me back to somewhere in Ireland. Just where did they come from?

Sources:

 

¹Bridenbough, Carl. Fat Mutton and Liberty of Conscience, Society in Rhode Island, 1636-1690. Brown University Press, Providence. p88

Images:

By This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See the Image and Data Resources Open Access Policy, CC0,

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60917199 

DNA Update: A Cousin Tangle

Is it the math or the tangled relationships that make using genetic DNA so hard to grasp? Sometimes it seems to be the proliferation of shiny new tools used to manipulate DNA results whose terms and possibilities are quickly adopted by those in the know which seem to leave me in the dust. Then again, maybe it's just my lack of practice.

How I envy those with compliant relatives willing to share their spit or cell scrapings. But it's time to stop dreaming about "what if" and working with the information that I have. To further my education, I signed up for a week long course about genetic DNA at the Society of Genealogists which just happened to be on while I was in London. I still haven't unpacked a lot of the information from the sessions but I did buy a new book that was recommended.

The book is Advanced Genetic Genealogy: Techniques and Case Studies edited by Debbie Parker Wayne. It covers many DNA related topics. The first one I looked at was Kimberly Powell's article on "The Challenge of Endogamy and Pedigree Collapse". Turns out that I have pedigree collapse in my line with the odd number of matching CMs for a distant cousin match. This line reaches back to the early 1600s so nothing is written in stone but the information I was given shows multiple tangled connections.

It is the tangled intermarriages before the common ancestors shared by me and my target match that, I believe, explain the odd CM number that my distant cousin and I share. Working down through the generations since our shared ancestral couple, my match and I are 4th cousins once removed which doesn't explain the 54CM DNA match. According to the "Average autosomal DNA shared by pairs of relatives" chart on the ISOGG website, average shared CMs for 4th cousins once removed are 6.64. Even 4th cousins have only 13.28 average shared CMs. But what about multiple intermarriage connections which, in this case, are thought to precede the common match? In that case, my match and I would be 4th cousins once removed more than once.

According to the article in Advanced Genetic Genealogy, the probable shared CMs can be calculated by figuring out each shared relationship and adding the probable CMs together. Well, there was intermarriage in the background of the ancestral couple which my match and I share. Quite a bit of intermarriage.

As the family trees show, Lydia, the granddaughter of John Tripp and his great grandson, Jonathan Tripp married. They were 1st cousins once removed.

But they were more than that as their mother's were sisters which made them 1st cousins on the maternal side as well. This meant that my match and I were related on 4 lines which, I believe, makes us 4th cousins once removed 4 times which would give us a probable amount of shared CMs of 26.56 (4 x 6.64) according to the probable shared CMs on the ISOGG chart. There is always a degree of variation in the shared CMs which may account for the actual CMs being 54 or perhaps there is further pedigree collapse in this line or even endogamy as this line is to Colonial American ancestors. On a more personal level, the inter-relatedness of Lydia and Jonathan Tripp does given me pause.

Sources:

https://dnapainter.com/tools 

https://isogg.org/wiki/Autosomal_DNA_statistics 

Wayne, Debbie Parker. Advanced Genetic Genealogy: Techniques and Case Studies. Wayne Research, Cushing, Texas, 2019

 


 

Closets, Expanding over Time

The house on Prescott Street, Halifax

When we were young and barely getting by, we moved across the country a couple of times. Canada is not a small country. It takes days, sometimes weeks to drive across, depending on how many stops are made along the way. When we finally made it to Nova Scotia, we had to set up a household from scratch. There had been no room for furniture in the back of the Dodge Fargo.

We moved through a few places during that stay back east. The last place we hung our hats was an old house on Prescott Street just off of Robie. It looked small from the outside but made use of all the space with bedrooms with sloping ceilings under the roof. There were cupboards tucked under the eaves but closet space was minimal.

When it came to furnishing the bedrooms, my partner remembered that there were a pair of iron bedframes languishing in an abandoned farmhouse belonging to his family. So, we drove the truck out to the farm in Antigonish. It was abandoned alright; the fields were so overgrown that the house was hard to see from the road. There was still furniture inside and the roof held so the furniture was in good shape. I expected there to be individual bedrooms but upstairs under the roof was one big open space containing a couple of beds and not much else. What struck me was that there were no closets, just a single nail to act as a hook for clothes beside each bed. I pointed that out to my partner and he said that they would have had just one change of clothes. Somehow the meager closets in the Prescott Street house didn't look so bad after that.

I hadn't thought back to those times or those skimpy closets for a long time, not until I took a course on Future Learn called Fashion's Future: The Sustainable Goals, which made me think about the clothes that now fill my walk-in closet. Times have changed, the closets are no longer skimpy but that is not a good or sustainable thing. Perhaps the world was better off when we only had one change of clothes, or at least, few enough clothes that they would fit in one skimpy closet. 

Adding Colour at the British Library

The British Library, London

Do you ever come across familiar names, ones from your family's past that catch your eye no matter the context? That happened to me this week in a transcription exercise for an NIGS (National Institute for Genealogical Studies) course that I'm taking. The letter to be transcribed was written by Thomas Ridout. I have a Thomas Rideout in my direct family line. Of course, my Thomas wasn't in Canada like the letter writer but spent his life in England.

My Thomas lived in the village of Ashmore in Dorset. I have never visited the village as I was unable to get to it without a car when I was in England but the literature about the village described it as being defined by the pond at its centre. The village was actually named after the pond, originally known as Ashmere. This fact and many more came from the book Ashmore, Co Dorset: A History of the Parish with Index to the Registers 1651 to 1820 by E.W. Watson, M.A., which I found at the British Library.

The research I had done in the past showed that Thomas Rideout was that staple of the English countryside, an ag lab (agricultural labourer). The census returns showed many more ag labs in the village. There was also a sprinkling of other occupations like that of his father Joseph, who was a woodsman. But, according to the Watson book, deer in the area were protected until 1830 necessitating a deer fence around cultivated land. The hunting for the privileged classes must have been good; at one point there were more that 500 deer in the area. That information added more colour to my ancestor's lives and made me wonder if they were among the poachers to which the law turned a blind eye.

My visit to the British Library added more context to the story of my Rideout family but, unfortunately, it didn't clear up any of the mystery surrounding Mary, Thomas Rideout's wife. She was born Mary Maidment and, according to census information, she was born somewhere in Gloucester. A hard to find birth is a typical brick wall problem but that is not the only mystery about Mary. Her husband Thomas died in 1842 but her last child, John Rideout, was born in 1845. Who was John's father and what was Mary's life like after giving birth to this latest Rideout child, three years after her husband's death? It must have been an open secret as John lived with the rest of the family in Ashmore. It makes me wonder how villages like Ashmore dealt with those kinds of issues. Looks like the subject for another library search.