Friday 10 November 2017

Finding Martha with DNA

Was Hannah Parks, wife of Joel King, the mother of Martha Campbell? In the absence of documentary evidence, DNA could answer this question, but I find DNA research quite mind-boggling and I often have to leave the computer and do something completely different until my brain is able to cope again.  Thank goodness Ruth is better at this stuff than I am.  Between us, we found a few common relatives who were possibly descended from Hannah Parks through some of her King children.  Tracing the family lines back to those people was a very tangled job, but eventually we came up with four living people to look at more closely - Sean, Shayne, Lorraine and Sherri. They all share DNA with some or all of me, my brother, Ruth, her brother and sister and her aunt Alice, all of whom are known descendants of Martha Campbell.  So it looked like there was no other possible reason for all this shared DNA than that we're all descended from one or the other of Martha's parents.  And Sean and Shayne both have Hannah Parks in their direct line of descent.

It turns out that there are other reasons for some of the shared DNA though - Lorraine, Sherri and Shayne all share a completely different set of common ancestors - Henry and Armilla Carter - with me and my brother, but not with Ruth's family.

To sort everyone out, I drew up a chart of how Ruth and I are related to our four DNA matches, which helped me figure out what questions needed to be asked, and how we might find more solid evidence that we really do have Hannah Parks in common with Sean and Shayne.



These family lines are much more tangled than this chart shows - it turns out that there were all kinds of people called Campbell, King and Thompson marrying each other, so the lines cross all over the place - which is why this simplified chart really helped me get a clear picture of where Ruth and I fit in, and, along with other information picked up along the way, made both of us quite confident that we're on the right track.

But I want to be sure!  And thankfully, Shayne's father is descended along a direct maternal line from Hannah Parks, via her daughter, Susannah King;  I'm descended along a direct maternal line from - I hope - Hannah's other daughter, Martha Campbell.  So, if Shayne's father's mitochondrial DNA matches mine, I'll know that Hannah really was Martha's mother.  But he hasn't had a mitochondrial DNA test, so I got in touch with Shayne and eventually she wrote back to say that her father would be happy to have one.  I got a kit sent to him right away, and it wasn't long before I was informed that he had sent his sample to the lab.  Now, I'm waiting for the result.....

Monday 6 November 2017

Finding Martha Campbell

Sadly, my friend in Canada didn't come up with the goods on my 2nd great-grandmother Martha Campbell.  I was particularly hoping she'd find a record of her marriage to Alpheus McConnell, which would tell me who her parents were.  But there don't seem to be any records of her birth, marriages or death anywhere.  The problem is twofold - many records from the area where Martha may have lived were destroyed years ago.  But that could be irrelevant, because Martha identified as a Baptist, and Baptists were notorious for not registering births, marriages and deaths.  This means that the only records that might be around would be church records, and I have no idea what church or churches to pursue, because I don't don't where Martha lived until a few years after she was married.

So things were looking bleak, Martha-wise, until I discovered that Martha was commonly known as Patty (and it turns out that lots of Marthas were called Patty back then).  So I went hunting in census records for a Patty Campbell who might be the right Martha, and eureka!  I found one!

Excerpt from page 67 of the 1851 Canada Census for Seymour Township.  Note that the King family are Methodists, but in the 1861 census, Martha and her husband are Baptists.  Which church did they get married in?

In the 1851 census for Seymour township in Northumberland Ontario, I found a 16 year old Patty Campbell with a Joel and Hannah King, as well as 15 year old Archibald Campbell and five younger children called King. This census didn't specify how people were related to each other, so some assumptions are necessary, which may or may not be correct:
  • Hannah Somebody married Mystery Campbell and had two children with him - Martha/Patty and Archibald
  • Mystery Campbell died sometime after 1837
  • Hannah Somebody married Joel King sometime before 1843 and had at least five children with him

I looked for the King family in the 1861 census, knowing that Martha/Patty was married to Jeremiah McConnell and living in Peterborough at that time - so I was pleased NOT to find Patty Campbell with the Kings, which would have been curtains for this line of inquiry.  But to my surprise, I didn't find Hannah either.  In 1861 Joel King had a different wife, called Catherine, the same five King children as in 1851, and some new ones, born after that.  So what happened to Hannah?

I then went looking for other sources of information about Joel King, and soon found him in several other family trees.  From these I learned that Hannah's surname was Parks - but nobody had any information about her, except the assumption that she died in 1854 - no parents, no firm birthdate, and no first husband or children called Campbell.  Much research time and effort by both my cousin Ruth and myself turned up nothing more about her.

We also looked for anything we could find about Archibald Campbell, Martha's likely brother, but couldn't find anyone we could be sure was the right one - Archibald Campbell was not an uncommon name.

So, we had no way of knowing whether the Patty in the 1851 census was our ancestor or not - until we started looking at DNA.

And what happened next I'll save for another time.