Nuts From the Family Tree: Farrell Hartley Biggerstaff House

Saturday, August 9, 2014

GEDmatch is coming back real strong!

GEDmatch.com is my all out favorite tool when getting down to the comparison of cousins DNA results to see where we match. Was recently in touch with one of Mom's strong matches on AncestryDNA and even though we both have good healthy sized trees to look at, neither of us - nor the Ancestry matching function - could see where we matched! 3rd to 4th cousin, and no match on our trees...? Huh? Obvious conclusion: a big fat mistake on one of our trees.

Cousin Michael was the match. He's great to work with, replies quickly and with as much info as he has. When I told him about GEDmatch he popped on over and had his raw file uploaded in a flash. And now that GEDmatch is going again (and looks to be better than ever) his data was finished with the first phase of processing, called tokenizing, by days end and that means that our kits were available for one-to-one comparison. The full processing which allows one-to-many analysis will take longer.

Because that one-to-one comparison was quickly available I could see that his kit and Mom's kit had really juicy matches on three chromosomes. Here's what that looked like.

Chr	Start Location	End Location	Centimorgans (cM)	SNPs
1	99733258	152971219	27.9	6363
6	1227564	9652130	21.3	2620
21	18580589	27602185	16.0	2435

Largest segment = 27.9 cM
Total of segments > 7 cM = 65.1 cM
Estimated number of generations to MRCA = 3.9

Then I took that information on over to my Farrell DNA Project spreadsheet and could see right away that he doesn't fit in there because there were no shared chromosome segments. My Farrell Project peeps do not match anywhere on chromosome 1 or 6, at all! And only one person even has even an inkling of anything happening on 21 and it's not on this particular segment.

So where does he fit? If not the Farrell line, which includes the surnames of House, Biggerstaff and Hartley too, then where on Mom's tree might he match. I went on over to Ancestry to check out Mom's Big Tree so that I could more easily visualize where the match could be and here's what I saw, with the candidate lines in the red box.

Click to enlarge.

The Williams, Price, and Whetstone lines are what we're after. Because Michael matches at about the 4th generation back, a list of the surnames and locations we're looking for is helpful.

Williams, Edwards, Price and another Williams are the surnames associated with Mom's paternal grandfather's line and they're all from Wales. None of Michael's ancestors are from Wales but that doesn't mean that there might not be a connection back before he can see, based on what's not on his tree.

Mom's paternal grandmother's lines are from Wales - Thomas - but Mom's paternal grandfather's line - Price and Hill- are mostly form Virginia. Michael has a lot of folks from Virginia on his tree so this is a commonality that bears closer scrutiny.

Now we come to the Whetstones. They hail originally from Germany and then probably Switzerland and on to Pennsylvania before the Revolutionary War. I don't see anything hopeful there.

So it looks like we need to take a closer look at the Price and Hill lines from the earliest days of the Virginia Colony forward. And we especially need to look at any lines that aren't filled out to about the 5 generation mark.

Well that's the problem in a nutshell and how we'll proceed. Don't know how much luck we'll have but at least it's a way forward. What I need is some Williams DNA and I know where to find it. Cousin Andrew tested on 23andMe.com and so now I'm off to connect up again and ask if he'd be willing to upload to GEDmatch. It would be very helpful to have Whetstone DNA as well... but I have to figure out how to get that.

Hey, I just stumbled into another GEDmatch tool that helps me get an idea of Dad's DNA! Dad passed before all of this DNA for genealogy stuff got going. But now I see how to get it! I'll blog about that next time when I've had more time to explore this new-to-me GEDmatch tool.

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2014/08/gedmatch-is-coming-back-real-strong.html

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Looking for church records at St. Peter's Catholic Church in Hancock, Maryland. Oh my!

I have no lovely trip photos from my visit to St. Peter's Catholic Church to use here so I'll pop in something scenic at the end to spruce it up. Instead I have quick snaps of index cards and a register page. If you're crazy-wild about genealogy, and some of you are, you'd probably just rather see the dusty records:)

Cousin Joseph whom we met because of an AncestryDNA match was a deep well of information about our shared ancestors and friends who inhabited the area around Magnolia, West Virginia. He was the one who told me about St. Patrick's Catholic Church just across the wide Potomac River on the Maryland side in Little Orleans. He also explained that the oldest records for that church were not at the church because it was a mission church. That means that that services - and records - were supplied by a circuit priest who traveled to a couple of satellite churches. That's still the case even today and the priest from St. Peter's in Hancock MD visits St. Patrick's and does the ritual on Saturday evening then returns and celebrates at St. Peter's on Sunday. It really must be difficult, if not impossible, to keep that schedule in the deep heart of winter! And that arrangement has been going on for at east 150 years, as far as I can tell, back when he was making his way on horseback. Can you imagine?!

Before we knew for sure the story of St. Patrick's in Little Orleans across the Potomac River from Magnolia, Mom had always speculated that it must have been a circuit rider who performed baptisms and marriages for all the Catholics in the area. Cousin Rich emphasized in an email not too long ago that these ancestors of ours were Irish Catholics and would probably have made whatever journey needed to get children baptized and the young folks wed. It was probably only a matter of time before we acted on our hunch and found where our ancestors worshiped, but Cousin Joseph pointed us right at it.

I had talked to the parish administrative staff a couple of times before the visit. I could tell that they were very willing to help but also very busy. I noted the hours the office was open and then checked their location on maps so we knew where we were going. I also got crystal clear in my mind what I was after and ranked them in importance so that no time would be wasted.

Originally Cousin Rich said that he might meet us there but then that didn't work out for him. So I got a list of what he was looking for too. Now I thought I was set.

The one thing I overlooked was directions on where the church office was. Silly, really. After knocking on a ridiculous number of doors, I stood outside and called the office number I brought with me. Of course the correct door was the very inviting one that entered into the kitchen... and right in front of me.

Once inside I was directed to the index files. Some fastidious and caring volunteers had transcribed all of the old registers and typed up index cards with all the information provided in the original entries. In this case the index was very thorough and correct as far as I could tell. Unfortunately, I did not find our Farrells. But I did find some other O'Farrells that we know aren't our folks but are fun to follow as a side entertainment. I carefully pulled the cards for any records that might need further investigation and marked their location in the file to insure easy and correct return. Then they were carefully placed on the big dining room table that was part of the office and photographed using both my camera and phone. The phone pic were immediately send to Cousin Rich for back up and his perusal.

I chatted up the assistant who was helping me and asked if I could just look at the old registers. Sure, she said, and out they came from the big safe where they were held. I was thrilled! Don't know what it is but I love looking at old books like this. They were in rather fragile condition and needed to be handled very gently or they might come apart any moment. She ended up bringing out four in all and we thumbed through sample pages. She showed me entries by a priest who did all his accounting in Latin. Too bad I couldn't read a thing. And there was another priest who mostly scrawled in a big lose hand. His were the most frustrating of all the entries. The entries I liked best were just short of calligraphy and tidily elegant.

One hears about these old parish registers and the priests who wrote in the big books. Some, it is said, drank to keep the cold away and make the job rest easy on the bones. I couldn't help guess if it might be the scrawler, the Latin scribe or the fastidious calligrapher who might have been fond of a little spirits to warm on a cold night?