French-Canadian DNA and reaching a solution

[Christina C]

Hello.

I use AncestryDNA. I have some successes but am tortured by not having finality. I have been at this since April 2019. I have come to wonder very recently if there has to be a different way. I have not made any progress in months since discovering the birth family of a 3rd great grandmother in a match of about 60 cM. While her line works out, supported to the 6th great grandparent level, her spouse or partner remains unknown, though I am more suspicious he does not stand out because he is part of another line in my tree already.

Anyone who has worked on their family tree should discover surprises: adoption or guardianship as suggested because there is a mismatch between the known surname and what DNA says is the surname of that person's biological family. Are these surprises published, either for me to tap into, and to later write up if not available? I have solved adoptions in many other trees while looking for Mr. X's family. And he is not my only mystery, so I really would like a solution so I can move on to another area of my tree.

What written resources, beyond Ancestry's records, should I consult? How can I learn if someone has already written about Mr. X? If no one has written about Mr. X, how do I present my solutions in a way they will be found and accepted by others?

Thanks!

[kiterunner]

I have a similar problem in my tree - I took a DNA test a couple of years ago to try to find out who the parents of my 2xg-grandmother were, but still no further forward with that although I have discovered and solved other mysteries along the way. I'm not quite clear whether you have a possible name for Mr X already or not?

[Phoenix]

Originally Posted by Christina C

If no one has written about Mr. X, how do I present my solutions in a way they will be found and accepted by others?

Thanks!

If you are the only person with a possible identity for Mr X, you could add him to your tree. People like to copy images from other trees, so if you wrote out your justification and attached it to him as an image, that might be a way of getting the information across.

If, on the other hand, every other tree has an (to your reasoning) incorrect candidate, no amount of reasoning is likely to change the opinions of the majority.

[Christina C]

I cannot convince even a minority. When I state, "You have a person running under a non-matching name due to adoption or guardianship, " people hear, "Your research is faulty." I have not found a way to overcome that, except if the guardianship papers exist. A local librarian stated, "Ancestry came in and took all those papers" which I translated as "Local or state government SOLD those papers to Ancestry." However, she thought I could get guardianship papers on that fourth great grandfather in New Hampshire, which I find hard to believe if Ancestry "took" everything. Even if Ancestry has these papers, would they not publish them in books? All I've got to say is I am not traveling to Utah for them.

[Phoenix]

I don't know what rules exist over ownership/copyright etc in other countries.

Here, the ownership of the records should not change, though Ancestry might have the sole right to display them online.

Usually, records are removed from local access while they are digitised. Once that process is complete, the original repository should offer free access.

Do you have a local history society who may know what has happened? A formal letter to the management of your library ought to produce a proper response.

As for getting other people to understand that biological research may lead in a different direction from paper research, I have never found a way to persuade anyone that they may be wrong. And it attacks the morals of a female ancestor, which is not always good hearing.

[Christina C]

Well, I have one female ancestor whose mother was from England and I think she may have been scamming an Overseer of the Poor in Vermont near the New York and Quebec borders. She named all three children very similarly, which I believe may point to the first name of her lover. He may had another family or he was unable to provide a living, perhaps an injured Civil War soldier. I am unclear why she got to keep her children. Maybe no Overseer was involved is the difference, an secret open to a few. I likely will never figure out who he is. However, I found it interesting at age 34 she married for the first time, a Civil War veteran whose wife had died, leaving many children. I wondered if the two men knew each other. She sent her sons to her parents and the young daughter, my ancestor, got to stay, and later had a half sister. I made a couple of inferences of what happened to the children of widows, or worse yet, a disabled soldier. I believe an Overseer in New York State made a second great grandmother give up her children after the Civil War, who was granted a divorce because he was disabled and sent to a veterans home. I am fairly certain she gave at least one to her sister because I have these matches all sharing the brother-in-law's surname. Another public tree I felt was unimportant because it showed all the children who died under age 2, and perhaps soon after birth. However, I feel it illustrates a story that if your father died around age 40 or 50, and your mother could not find a suitable man to remarry quickly, and you have few or no older siblings to help out with jobs, she may have been left with the last option of placing even a five-year-old up for adoption because it frees her up to either marry someone later and, from the Overseer point of view, becoming immediately available to work as a house servant. I have a 66 cM match whom I believe shares second great grandparents and her ancestor, born in 1828, in the St-Laurent area of Montreal, matching the location of that set of great grandparents, bringing my attention for the first time of other the early child deaths and relatively young death of their father. There is absolutely nothing else in that tree that matches.

Pure conjecture. I hope to find more to support these hypotheses. The Overseer system was alive an well in my mother's childhood. My first genealogical score was discovering a secret uncle and the matching birth certificates. The 1940 Census showed my grandfather, a veteran, in prison, but out just in time for the old man's draft registration for WWII. While in prison, my grandmother had one last child, my grandfather's. I found one descendant of this line. I guess children were not allowed at the Poor House. My mother and her siblings grew up without each other in foster care, except for the youngest, who was adopted. I believe there is a great untold story of how women had to surrender children routinely due to the early death or disablement of a husband, even as a veteran, and in my grandfather's case, committing a crime. I haven't gotten around to go through microfiche starting at a likely date of conception to see what he did to get sent away for a few years.

[Phoenix]

I have no idea what arrangements were in place to organise the poor in your country.

Here, they might check to find out who would be responsible if a woman fell on hard times, but they would not wish to put themselves to the cost of providing for the children and their mother if they could possibly avoid it. If there were relations or friends prepared to look after the children, they would be grateful to be relieved of the burden.

If you have matches with a brother-in-law's surname, might that not simply mean that the sisters shared a large amount of DNA that happened to be passed down two separate lines?

If a woman gives a name to a child, it may be because she knows who the father is, she thinks she knows who the father is, or out of spite against someone who most certainly is NOT the father.

I have an illegitimate ancestor whose mother named it for a man who she ultimately married, but not a shred of DNA evidence to back this claim.

I think you need some sort of paper trail, to compare what you think happened with what is said to have happened and tease out clues and inconsistencies.

[marquette]

If you need to access the original records of Ancestry images, or those not yet digitised and on-line, especially those collected by the LDS and kept on microfilm in Utah, many of the microfilms and on-line access can be had through a local LDS Family History library. You don't have to go all the way to Utah.

Locally, here in Australia, I used to visit our local LDS FH library and had access to all the microfilms of census records and GRO microfiche, long before they were transferred to Ancestry. The LDS went around and microfilmed the records, but the originals remained in the relevant authority. Not all the microfilms have been digitised and neither were all made available to Ancestry. (Especially, in the UK, vestry notes and parish overseer records, only Baptisms, marriages and deaths from each parish).

Its worth investigating the familysearch website under the CATALOG tab, searching by area then looking at the records available and understanding the icons which indicate where or how they can be viewed.

You cannot convince some people that their research is flawed - I cant even get my own mistakes corrected after they were copied to someone else's tree. In my husbands family, the reaction was "the DNA must be wrong, because our research (from the 1970s) is correct".

I have taken to putting my arguments in a comment in other people's trees, rather than messaging them. Then others can see my reasoning or knowledge, without the tree owner having to be persuaded to make corrections. I am always polite and back up my comment with hard evidence.