Sleuthing the Kirkpatricks

It has been a very long time since I have posted. I have been researching, but apparently haven't felt like blogging in a long time.

With that being said, I am meeting with a DNA cousin tomorrow and I brought a ton of unlabeled photographs to share with him in the hopes he might recognize some people. I have also been posting photos on the Kirkpatrick Genealogy Facebook page, hoping maybe someone there might know the people. Alas, it seems that there are many Kirkpatricks which came to this country in the mid-1700s, but mine came over in about 1831, and I have yet to meet a Kirkpatrick cousin from that larger group. Whereas my family stayed in Troy, NY, the rest of the Clan seems to have headed south and west.

BUT, the person I am meeting tomorrow is absolutely a Kirkpatrick cousin and from the Troy, NY area. So I know he is family.

I recently had an "aha!" moment when I realized that I recognized a house in the background. Guessing on the children, I assumed the photograph was from 1900 and I looked at the census for that address and sure enough, the people I assumed were in the photograph were all living in the house together at the time.

The first photograph below I know all the people.

Nellie Jane Kirkpatrick Lee with sons Herbert "Herb" and Horace "Harry"

This photograph was labeled - and I do know the house - Kirkpatricks after the porch and fence taken.

And this third photograph was the mystery. But based on the known children above, the 1900 Census, and other photographs of the house, I think this must be Martha Jane Wright Kirkpatrick holding Harry with little Herb standing in front.

As of a few years ago, the house looks like this:

The house has seen some better days.

This was a house in my family for generations. Through the census documents, one can see first that Charles and Nellie Jane lived there with her brother and sister-in-law, and Nellie and Oliver are in and out a couple times, and then Martha Jane's father is there with them for a while before his death, and then Oliver and Nellie raise their children there. Must have been a sad day when the house was sold and Olive moved with her parents Oliver and Nellie to Bronxville, NY.

A Missing Link (The NOLA Olivers)

Thru DNA connections I have two people who do not necessarily know one another, but they have the same ancestor in their trees. I haven't been able to communicate in a meaningful way with either cousin about their trees, so I don't know how much information/people in the trees is first hand knowledge of people they actually know.

Ancestry indicates that they are both 4th - 6th cousins, which means at a minimum a 3rd great grandparent is our connection.

The surname I find in both, well, all three trees actually, because of mine, is Oliver. I have a second great grandmother named Oliver. I do know, though, that she came from Ireland in the mid-1800s. And that is about all I know. I know some of her descendants, of course. :)

I have another DNA connected person (different branch, but I know where she fits) who I know has put some wrong information in her tree. I have told her about the error, but she has not made the change. So, with that tidbit, I know to approach other people's public trees with caution.

I am trying to piece this man's life together and see if I can get further back. I have found his parents - lucky for me - but I still haven't jumped over the pond to Ireland.

And I can't get further back. Also, is his mother Ella or Ellen? A search in the Orleans Parish Marriage records comes up with nothing for a William and Ella/Ellen. (That doesn't mean anything, of course...) But I haven't been able to find anything about them. I suppose I might conclude that they - William and Ella - do not live in New Orleans. Why would I think they do? Perhaps Joseph Mack Oliver moved to New Orleans from elsewhere and then settled and married here. Maybe he is the first of my branch of Olivers to live in NOLA.

WAIT! As I write this I remember that one census indicated that Joseph Mack Oliver was born in Texas. If that were true - all other census indicate that he was born in Louisiana - then perhaps William and Ella/Ellen are in Texas and I am searching entirely in the wrong state. Though it does appear that William was a witness to the wedding, which would bring him back to NOLA. Though he might have traveled for the joyous occasion.

But, we also have an obituary which indicates that Joseph Mack Oliver had a sister and half brother... a sister he calls Lita and a half brother he calls Peter Tatum. We see Peter in some of the census documents living with Joseph or his children. I guess I need to get back to writing that life story and see what I can tease out.

And, am I jumping to conclusions on the name of the father? Maybe that is not shorthand for William. Maybe it is another name entirely.

I am getting discouraged enough to start entering all the Oliver marriages before a certain date in to Ancestry to see what pops up. Silly and a huge waste of time, isn't it? But that is what I am thinking. I should just finish writing the story of Joseph Mack Oliver and see what trails I determine and explore those.

New Orleans Cousins

I have fallen in love with New Orleans. There is something about the city which hits me viscerally. I have no way to explain it. And it's not the Creole or Cajun food or the jazz music particularly... it's the architecture and feel of the city. Wait, I need to amend that, as I love the Zydeco music!) I don't know what it is really, but I am very happy in New Orleans, but not for the reasons others may love NOLA.

You may understand, then, how excited I was to find a DNA connection with people born in New Orleans. Now I have fantasies that my DNA aligns to the city like a compass to magnetic north! I have not yet been able to connect their trees to my tree, but they also have Irish heritage and they have the Oliver name in their tree, as do I, through my 2nd great grandmother. Though my second great grandmother and her husband settled in Troy, NY, not Louisiana. So, where is the split? Did one of her brothers go to NOLA while she headed to NY? Or was the immigrant further up the tree?

I have communicated (and soon to meet) a fellow genealogist who is related the the wife of the man I believe to be the patriarch of the branch I am researching - so the younger generations tie us together, but we are not biologically related. She has not researched the Oliver family in New Orleans, but perhaps she can point me to some of the resources not yet available on Ancestry.com which can help me climb the tree. My new friend has been researching for 20 years.

The Surprising origins of the Irish

This explains some of my husband's DNA results... he is the 'Emerald Isle' the whole way, but with a tiny trace of European Jew and Caucasian... so some of his ancestors possibly walked west to Ireland and Great Britain. I say that, because he doesn't have any recent ancestors from anywhere other than Great Britain and the US.

The Irish people have a complex genetic history shaped by mass migrations from the Middle East and Spain, with blue eyes and fair skin arriving through a later migration from Eastern Europe, new DNA evidence indicates. The evidence was found in the bones of four people buried in Ireland: a brown-eyed, black-haired female who lived on a farm some 5,200 years ago, discovered buried in a small village in Northern Ireland, and three men who lived between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago, found on Rathlin Island, just off the Irish coast. When researchers analyzed the woman’s genome, they discovered a strong similarity to people from Spain and Sardinia, who are believed to have originally migrated to Europe from the Middle East. The genomes from the three Bronze Age men revealed a different genetic background, with about 30 percent of their DNA closely resembling populations from modern-day Russia and Ukraine. These blue-eyed males also had a genetic variant linked to a hereditary iron-overload disorder, haemochromatosis, which is so prevalent in Ireland that it’s also known as Celtic disease. Researchers said their findings show that the modern Irish were largely shaped by the 1,000 years of migration from Eastern Europe. “There was a great wave of genome change that swept into Europe from above the Black Sea into Bronze Age Europe, and we now know it washed all the way to the shores of its most westerly island,” study author Dan Bradley tells The Guardian (U.K.). He said the migrants may have even brought “the introduction of language ancestral to western Celtic tongues.

Taken from the January 15th edition of the Week Magazine.