DNA Link for Newark and Chicago Branches

Someone with a Lutter ancestor has appeared in my DNA matches (autosomal) from AncestryDNA.  This has never happened before.  (Even the Y-DNA test produced no matches.)

Possible relative in AncestryDNA matches for Jody
(Name and picture blocked by Jody)

The family tree for this DNA cousin had one Lutter ancestor, Emma Lutter, from Illinois.

Emma Lutter (1892-1948) in the family tree of Jody's DNA cousin

I know this Emma Lutter.  She lived in Chicago and married Frank Scaar.  I have Emma's bank book from the year 1907.

Emma Lutter's bank book.  Gustav Schwabe was her guardian.

The bank book for Emma and her siblings, Adolph and Gertrude, were not handed down to me as family heirlooms.  They were purchased on eBay.

The bank books caught my attention because I researched a man named Alex Lutter from Chicago.  Emma, Adolph, and Gertrude were his children.  I was looking for Alex Lutter because he witnessed the marriage in 1888 in Newark, New Jersey, of my great great grandparents, Hermann Lutter (1860-1924) and Clara R Uhl (1864-1955).  

Signature of witness Alex Lutter

Aside from this marriage record and the newspaper announcement of the nuptials, I found no traces of Alex Lutter in Newark, New Jersey.  Instead, I found a man named Alexander Lutter in Chicago.  In 1890 he naturalized, registered to vote, and married Ottilie Dahlke.

cookcountyvitalrecord.uscertificates.com
(fee-based site)

Alexander Lutter died in Chicago on December 23, 1897, age 33.  (Born about 1864.)  His wife died May 23, 1904, leaving the three children orphaned.

Alexander Adolph Lutter (1895-1969), the son of Alex and Ottilie, married Anna Kabitzke.  Anna's family contacted me.  The couple had no known children.  (Her relative was the first to write a guest blog post.)

Alexander the son filed for a passport.  Below is his photo from the application.  Alexander wrote that his father came to the United States from Germany in 1885 and resided in Chicago, Illinois for "12 years, uninterruptedly," from 1885-1897.

Alexander Adolph Lutter (1895-1969)
Is there a family resemblance?

If the father Alexander lived in Chicago from his arrival in 1885 until his death in 1897, this contradicts the voter registration from the year 1890, where Alexander is stated to have lived in Illinois for only one year.  Then I considered the source and decided that this information was not too reliable:  the informant was not even born until 1895 and was two years old when his father passed, so he likely has no personal knowledge of his father and no older relative to ask.

So how is Alexander Lutter (1864-1897) of Chicago related to my Lutter line of Newark?  We don't know- yet.  Let's hope that the submitter of the DNA contacts me and provides more clues.

With a birth date in 1864, Alexander Lutter could be the brother of my great great grandfather, Hermann Lutter, who was born about 1860.  In his will in 1924, Hermann mentioned two siblings, both deceased:  his brother Otto (1845-1909), formerly of Harrison, Hudson County, New Jersey; and his sister, Ottillia, formerly of Neuhaus, Thueringen, Germany.  If Alexander is another sibling, why was there no mention of Alexander or his children, three of whom were alive in 1924?

Surviving Genes of Walling and Dey

I have figured out the most recent common ancestors of a DNA cousin.

A new Shared Ancestor Hint appeared for me at AncestryDNA.  This system compares the family trees of my DNA cousins, looking for the same ancestors from my family tree.

The shared ancestor suggestion was William Walling (1770-1824) of Monmouth County, New Jersey.  He is one of my 5X great grandfathers.  (His transcribed will can be found here.)  I don't know why his wife, Rebecca Dey (born about 1770), my 5X great grandmother, did not appear also.

Based on our family trees, this DNA cousin is a fifth cousin of my father.  AncestryDNA reports that I share some DNA with this fifth cousin.

Here is the step where a lot of people stumble:  this scenario does not prove that William Walling and Rebecca Dey are our biological ancestors; nor does it prove that the DNA we share is from William Walling and Rebecca Dey.

We need to see how much DNA and which segments of DNA are shared with this DNA cousin so that we can triangulate the match.  You cannot triangulate with AncestryDNA.

To triangulate, we need to look at other DNA cousins who match on these same shared segments of DNA and determine if they too trace ancestry back to William Walling and Rebecca Dey, or one of the ancestors of either of William Walling or Rebecca Dey.  With AncestryDNA, you have no information about where any of your other DNA cousins match you, so you cannot know if they match on the same segments as any other DNA cousins.

I remembered the name of this DNA cousin from 23andMe, where we had corresponded two years earlier.  We had discussed the idea that the common ancestors were not too far back in time and were likely in Monmouth County, New Jersey because this DNA cousin matched my father, his siblings, and their father's cousin from the Winterton/Dunn line in Monmouth County.  If this segment can be further identified as a Walling/Dey segment, then we know that the segment came to my father via William Winterton's mother, Sophia Walling.

We can see the shared DNA at 23andMe.

Note that one of the matches, a sibling of my father, shares a very tiny segment of only 5 cM.  Most people would disregard such a small amount, but as you can see in the graph, this small segment is in line with the larger segments shared by other close relations.

Prior exchanges with this DNA cousin at 23andMe did not lead to William Walling and Rebecca Dey because his family tree had not yet grown that many generations back.  Two years later, his family tree at Ancestry was more robust and prompted the discovery.

The next step is to look at the other DNA cousins who share this segment.  I maintain Excel spreadsheets for my closest relatives.

This snippet is from the spreadsheet of my first cousin, twice removed.  I list his DNA cousins by chromosome of where they share identical DNA.  The Walling/Dey cousin shares an identical segment on chromosome 7, starting around 91,000,000 and ending around 127,000,000.

I checked all of these smaller matches against the Walling/Dey cousin to see if they match him as well as my first cousin.  All of them do.  If this shared DNA is from the Walling/Dey couple, then all of these DNA cousins will also descend from Walling/Dey or from one of the ancestors of either William Walling or Rebecca Dey.

This is where you need to depend on others for information.  Some of these DNA cousins offer family tree information; most do not.  I reviewed their surname and location lists and family trees, if they had any, and saw nothing in common with Walling/Dey.  I sent them all a note, describing what we need to look for.

So far, nobody has replied.  Without finding a connection to Walling/Dey in these other matches, we cannot triangulate to declare that this segment of DNA is from Walling/Dey.

Holiday Access to Ancestry.com

From July 1 - 5, 2015 Ancestry.com offers free access to help you celebrate the 4th of July.  Go to the homepage, click on the "Search Free" box.

I entered "Ezra Dunn" for the name and "New Jersey" as the birthplace.  This brought me to a darkened page of results, asking for my email address so that I could be issued a username and passcode.  I clicked "No Thanks" and the list of results brightened.  There were 27 records, most from New Jersey, and just a few with the first name "Ezra."

I clicked on the first record and was brought to the page below, requiring registration to view the record.  Again I clicked "No thanks," but was returned to the list of results and not the actual record.

With my paid account, I searched for "Ezra Dunn" born in New Jersey and returned over seven million records.  (Over 99% of those records are irrelevant, so more specific search parameters would be more helpful.)

If anyone tries out this free access, please let us know what record types from which countries result.  Someone told me that a credit card is required for Free Access, which people are understandably hesitant to provide for a free service.

If this is truly free access to all of Ancestry.com, then you have a great opportunity to explore the site to see if continued access via paid subscription could help your research.