Ever since I was little, I loved old things. From the days of exploring my Great-Aunt’s abandoned and dilapidated home across the country road from our farm, I can remember holding viewer cards and envisioning myself as a long dead relative looking at them with amazement.
Old Eaton’s catalogues with pictures of corsettes and bustles grabbed my attention as I thought of myself as a consumer from the late 1800’s.
I loved looking through old photo albums and finding out who was who and who was related to whom. And the epidemy of treasure-troves was Granny’s Secretary Desk at my Uncle Emmett’s house, filled with old letters, greeting cards, post cards and photographs. I loved that desk so much that my Uncle sold it to me for $35.
The years went by and I accumulated family history documents, letters, postcards and photos. Family became aware that I welcomed anything and everything about the past. So began my genealogical collection that went into boxes and envelopes.
When my father died in 1988, I kept him “alive” in my heart by going through the collection and sorting his history and wanting to know more. I joined genealogy groups, spent time at the Church of Latter Day Saints, attended genealogy conferences, corresponded with long lost relatives and gleaned as much verbal family history as I could from close relatives. Aunt Edna and Auntie Jo were of particular importance. Auntie Jo recommended Myrtle Connelly in Ottawa, who then recommended me to Alice McGregor (nee Pennell) in Australia, who then recommended me to Bart Jones (mother Crew) in New Zealand.
One of the genealogy groups I was involved in was called PAF Support Group. PAF stood for Personal Ancestral File which was free computer software created and distributed by the Church of Latter Day Saints. They needed people who knew the software to run groups and I, being very computer savvy, easily fell into this role. At the time, I was also using another relatively expensive genealogy software program which I can’t remember the name – but it was somewhere around $250. It was very detailed, hard to learn but quite amazing. It generated genealogy “books” with an index which I merged into a Microsoft Word document so that I could customize the stories and add photos.
My first book was my Dad’s mother’s family – Descendants of Richard and Rachel Pennell. It came out so well that I then moved on to my mother’s family – Descendants of John Gallson/Ounpuu. This book became known as “The Book” and not for any good reason whatsoever.
One of my cousins is adopted so I added her to the genealogy program as that. When I generated The Book of descendants of my grandfather, it looked great and I proceeded to merge it with Microsoft Word, added stories and pictures of everyone, including my adopted cousin. It made no difference to me that she was adopted. She was my cousin and my relationship with her in my childhood was all good memories. Unfortunately, I was unaware that the program omitted adding her husband and her two children into the index, as the program didn’t see them as descendants of my grandfather.
“The Book” ended my relationship with her forever, and nearly ended my relationship with her siblings and my Aunt forever. It even caused irreparable damage and completely unnecessary stress on the relationship between my mother and her sister. It was absolutely terrible. No apology was good enough, no excuse was accepted. End of story.
#1 Lesson Learned: No more books without warnings, apologies, disclaimers and pseudonyms.
Unfortunately, this notorious book came back to bite me again when my mother passed The Book onto a daughter of my mother’s half-sister. I cautioned my mother that before she handed it over, she had to give my cousin the heads-up that the story about her grandmother Mary (my mother’s stepmother) was only from my mother’s memories and point of view which were not good. With this warning, The Book began to circulate, and it wasn’t long before word came that there was hurt feelings that Mary was depicted in such a negative way.
#2 Lesson Learned: Don’t put anything bad about someone in writing especially if it’s an opinion or a childhood memory. Because all that can change!
With the disaster of Descendants of John Gallson/Ounpuu, I moved away of my mother’s side and focused back on my father’s side. What could go wrong there? I had lots of written documentation and verbal confirmations. If I couldn’t trust my Aunt Edna and Auntie Jo, well, who could I trust?
Aunt Edna had done a lot of work on my paternal grandmother’s family already (Pennell’s and Crew’s), but curiously not anything on my paternal grandfather’s ancestors (Eady’s and Smith’s). In retrospect, this was a flag, but I didn’t think much about it. I found lots of pre-existing genealogy on my paternal grandfather’s ancestry, especially the Smith’s, believe it or not. They were Americans and Americans are very good in tracing their American history, right from the Mayflower to Washington to Obama. They write books about them – which makes my eye twitch ever so slightly.
Coat-tailing onto these pre-existing genealogies was exciting and relaying all my discoveries about them to Aunt Edna and Auntie Jo was so gratifying. I even fell back into the bad judgement of passing along lots of this information to other relatives. We were descendants of John Smith, an original immigrant from a sister-ship of the Mayflower. There were the Putnams, the Starbucks, Mosley’s, etc. etc. I joined a Putnam Society and found a genealogical connection to Lizzy Bordon (which in retrospect was not a good thing), presidents, war heros.
I began to write to my grandfather’s half-brother’s daughter, Florence Eagle. She was in her late 80’s or 90’s and in the second letter she wrote in very shaky penmanship, that she regretted to tell me that my grandfather was not really related to her at all and that my great-grandmother (Leah Eady) had come to live with her father’s family as a domestic and brought my grandfather (Adoniram Warner Smith, nicknamed “Nide”) with her as a young boy.
I showed Auntie Jo the letter and she said, “Well, yes, but I never thought of ourselves as anything but Smiths.” And then the story came out. She knew it and so did Aunt Edna. Grampa’s father was unknown.
#3 Lesson Learned: Pay attention to the flags and history is written by the victors. Meaning, lots of information ignored and deliberately omitted.
I wanted so much to believe my Aunties, so I hung onto “I always believed we were Smiths” and followed down some very logical paths, trying to track down my grandfather’s biological father. I wanted to be a Smith. How could we not be Smiths!!
I wrote many letters to a descendant of my Great-grandmother (Leah Eady), Hazel Eady, cajoling her to snoop around and find anything she could for me. And she was more than willing but cautioned that she needed to be careful as it was a touchy subject. (Hmmm)
A letter immerged from the late 1880’s saying, “…so Leah has decided to name her boy Nide after the father…” Holy cow! That was exciting. I’d also found ANOTHER Adoniram Warner Smith in the same township who was my grandfather’s adoptive father’s 1st cousin AND who was a widower at the time of my grandfather’s birth. In my mind, the story was ALL clear and my suspicions were absolutely correct and my Aunties’ reputations were saved.
And then I sent my DNA into Ancestry.ca to connect with all the Smith’s, Starbuck’s, Mosley’s… Lizzy Bordon’s. Ancestry helped me to fill in names on my maternal side and my dad’s maternal side and as the years went by, I became puzzled and more puzzled that not ONE Smith showed up as a DNA match to me EXCEPT descendants of my grandfather.
In the meantime, my sister Carol received a free opportunity to send her DNA into 23&me, and she would send me any inquiries she’d get. One in particular was from a descendant of O’Reilly from Osceola, Ontario, a very short distance from Haley Station, where my grandfather was born. I connected with this person, and she sent me a picture of her grandfather (right) and I compared to my grandfather (left).
Further DNA investigation proved that the connection was not with the O’Reilly’s, but with the mother of the man pictured above, Mary Jane Aughney. Conclusion: Grampa’s biological father was one of Mary Jane’s brothers. And in fact, there are a few Aughney’s that show up on my DNA match list in Ancestry.
#4 Lesson Learned: DNA is god.
This brings me to another lesson that unfortunately I must be vague about. A person used information handed down by his mother to create a biological connection to someone in my family. It caused stress for my family member and only after my family member died, did I discovered that the person had his DNA on Ancestry.ca and that we were NOT connected. I informed the person that his mother was incorrect, and I wished him well in finding his true biological father.
#5 Lesson Learned: DNA is god.
Now I’m going to circle back to Lesson #3, about information being ignored and omitted. This isn’t just in the older generation. Contemporaries do the same thing. This surprized me – over and over again. To my mind, we’ve come a long way. We’re open minded in the 21st century, willing to accept the “misdeeds and sins” of our ancestors because often they are no longer regarded as bad. But I learned that this is only accepted by some opened minded people, but not by all.
I believe that every family has a relative who “seems” to know all the gossip of the aunties and uncles, grandparents and great-grandparents. And many times, it’s the death of these ancestors that loosens the lips of the guardians of these tidbits and tales. I am one of those people who love to hear about all these stories because no matter how far-fetched they may seem, there is a thread of truth to every story.
If a family member does something totally “off” or not in line with the “normal” events of the family, I can guarantee, there’s an off-colour gem-of-a-story hidden. And then it pays off big time to listen to the gossipy family member. They have learned through their own gossipy parents or grandparent what really happened. Unfortunately, because there was no evidence of these events, its only through logic that you might be able to put the puzzle together. And suddenly you have that AH-HA moment when it all makes sense.
Here is an instance of family gossip. On the eve of my Aunt Edna’s wedding, my grandmother (her mother), called a meeting with Aunt Edna’s betrothed to make him aware of a family secret that my grandmother felt he had the right to know. The secret was that my grandfather was illegitimate. Hearing this story seemed very believable as I’d been told that my grandmother was a very pious Anglican of English descent. I’ll never know when she found out he was illegitimate and could only think that it must have been after her own marriage to him. After all, being that pious, why would she marry him with that “horrible” baggage.
Gathering data for genealogy involves marriage dates and birth dates and if you do the math, you often find out that the months between the marriage date of the parents and the birth date of the first born is shorter than 9 months. This is the case with Aunt Edna and her first born. So that changes the context of the marriage-eve meeting. So, maybe my grandmother didn’t know her daughter was pregnant. Sounds logical and believable.
It was only when I discovered the DNA information that revealed my grandfather’s Irish Catholic heritage, that suddenly, the marriage-eve meeting made a lot more sense. It was very likely more “embarrassing” to my pious Anglican/English grandmother that not only was my grandfather illegitimate, but his father was also Irish/Catholic.
#6 Lesson: There’s ALWAYS something more to the stories.
After years of researching my mother’s ancestry, I felt I’d pretty much exhausted my resources. However, Ancestry really does a bang-up job and continually adding more data to their arsenal. As well, as years go by, government held information is released. For instance, Canadian census and UK census are kept private for 100 years. This was frustrating, because I was trying to find descendants of my Grandmother Gallson’s siblings so I could connect with them. Case in point, was my mother’s memory of receiving packages from “Aunt Edie” in England. Mom even remembered that Wembly and London was written on the return address.
The only pictures Mom had of her mother was a passport picture and one other very small picture of a woman standing amid a garden of flowers. On the back is written “Edie in her garden”. But it wasn’t until 100 years after the 1901 Census was done, I could see the 2001 census, and then wait another 10 years before I could see the 1910 census. And ANOTHER 10 years to see the 1920 census. I believe now that release redacted versions of census records.
to be continued…