Tuesday 19 December 2017

And the winner is.....

Me! and Ruth!  And anyone else who's been trying to figure out who Martha Campbell's mother was.

The result of the mtDNA test I mentioned last time are in, and Shayne's father has proven to be an exact match with me - and as far as I can see, that's a pretty darn good reason to say that his 3rd great-grandmother and mine are one and the same - Hannah Parks.  If you don't know what I'm talking about, please see my previous post.

While this solves one mystery, it also opens up several others, which will no doubt drive me crazy for the next few months, if not years.  The first one is - who was Martha Campbell's father?  Silly me, when I first started looking for Martha's parents, I expected to find them both at once.  But somewhere along the way, I started to suspect that her father might have died when she was a child, and her mother remarried.  It turns out I was right - either that, or Hannah was never married to Martha's father, but that's not too likely, given that Martha's surname was Campbell, not Parks.  So far, I've found no clues as to who he was, beyond the reasonable assumption that his last name was Campbell, and the possibility (just a guess) that he was the brother of another Campbell in my tree.  So I'm on another quest.

But the second mystery is, in some ways, more interesting - who were Hannah Parks' parents?  There was an influx of UEL Parks families into Canada after the American Revolutionary War, many of whom are quite well documented.  So finding Hannah's parents or grandparents among them shouldn't be too daunting.  But it is.  Amongst all the reams of information I've found about Parks families, there's only one Hannah who might be the right one - but nobody seems to know anything about her, beyond her approximate birth date.

Maybe mtDNA will eventually lead me to Hannah's mother.  Meanwhile, I'm taking a bit of a genealogy break to give my brain a rest.