Death Certificate Not Enough

The death certificate for Alexander Lutter has arrived.  He died in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois on December 23, 1897.  Unfortunately, his parents are not listed.  He was 33 years old when he died of "fatty degeneration of the heart."  Is he a brother of my great great grandfather, Herman Lutter?  We still do not know.

I obtained the date of death from a local newspaper, but the Cook County Archives were initially unable to locate a certificate.  (Alexander's wife, Ottilie Dahlke, died in 1904.  Her death certificate was easily found and listed Waldheim Cemetery as the place of burial.  Two cemeteries share this name, but neither could locate a record of this Lutter branch.  One is still named Waldheim; the other is now Forest Home Cemetery.)

Alexander Lutter does not appear in the online index through Cook County's search page.  Actually, no deaths for the year 1897 appear in this index.

Recently FamilySearch.org produced an index of deaths in Cook County.  Alexander Lutter appeared.  I reapplied for the death certificate via postal mail to the Cook County Clerk and received the death certificate in a few weeks.

The death certificate referenced a coroner's report.  An online index provided the location of this record.  I sent away for a copy.  The slightest clue could help place this piece of the puzzle into a larger picture.

This is done as a quest to find Alex Lutter, a witness to the marriage of my great great grandparents, Herman Lutter (1860-1924) and Clara Uhl (1864-1955) in 1888 in Newark, Essex County, New Jersey.  I find no record of an Alexander Lutter in Newark and no connection between the Chicago Lutters and my Lutters.  Herman Lutter's will mentioned children of two siblings, Otto and Ottilie, but not Alexander.

The only hint that tells me that I could be on the right path is a DNA match at AncestryDNA to a great great granddaughter of Alex Lutter and Ottlie Dahlke through their daughter, Emma, who married Frank Scaar.  This person has not responded to my inquiries.

Additional Details for a Family Story

One of the family stories of my maternal grandmother was that her grandmother, Delia Joyce (1862-1929), was a baby when her mother threw her to safety just as she was dragged to her death by a train.

The 1870 federal census has an accompanying mortality schedule that listed people who died in the year 1870 before the census commenced on June 1st.  Mary Joyce was on this mortality schedule in Pawling, Dutchess County, New York, as being killed by "cars" in May of 1870.  Her widower, Patrick Joyce, and four children, Mary, Adelia (Delia), John, and James were enumerated on the actual census.

Absent a death certificate, additional information was sought from newspapers.  The accident was in Katonah, south of Pawling in Westchester County, New York.  One article did not mention a child and another mentioned an infant child.  Delia was about seven years old at the time of the accident, so the focus was on one of her younger brothers as the baby who was saved.

I just found some more newspaper articles about this tragedy that clarify that the child was female, though she is not named and could have been Delia or her older sister Mary.  The articles appeared June 21st in the New York Herald and June 22nd in the Rochester Daily Union and Advertiser.

The key to finding these articles was by not using Mary's name as a search term.  Instead, I looked for articles containing Katonah (where the accident occurred) and Pawling (where Mary lived) with the narrow date of May or June of 1870.

Two newspapers carried the article about "a respectable married woman" from Pawling, not named, whose leg was "almost sever[ed]" by the train as she attempted to disembark when the train started to depart so that she did not leave her daughter who was already safely on the platform.

According to another article, Mary lived a few hours.

Mary (who was born as Mary or Margaret Campbell in Ireland, according to the records of her children), should not have been on the 1870 mortality schedule if she died after June 1st.  Perhaps her husband could not recall the exact date of death and the census recorder noted her information for the month of May.  Good thing this rule was bent because I may have never found any information on this sad story if Mary had not appeared on that mortality schedule.

23andMe Non Update

To celebrate DNA Day, FamilyTreeDNA and AncestryDNA had brief sales on their kits.  Their autosomal DNA testing kits regularly cost $100 as of this writing.

23andMe moved in the opposite direction and doubled its price in October of 2015 to $199.  The price was reduced temporarily by $50 a few times since then.  To celebrate Mother's Day, the $50 price drop is available to some customers through May 8, 2016.  (If you are not in the United States, you see a different version of 23andMe with different pricing structures.)

What bothered me was the rest of this email, in which I was again promised the "migration to the new 23andMe experience."  I have been waiting since November, when anonymous DNA matches were supposedly being phased out.  My ancestors took less time to migrate across the Atlantic Ocean in dinky ships.

I can see new matches.  Am I not seeing all of them?  Did an unknown close relative test but is blocked from view?  Some matches have full names while others have initials or partial names.  These profiles I can contact to request to "share genomes," which simply means we will both be able to view the shared segments of DNA to possibly assign to a common ancestral branch.  But I still have many anonymous matches, people with no identifying information and no way of being reached.

23andMe.com:  As of November 11th [2015], some aspects of DNA Relatives have been modified in preparation for the transition to the new 23andMe experience.  Pending introductions have been canceled.  Anonymous participants will only be able to receive messages from users that have been transitioned to the new experience. . .

Based on the amount of shared DNA, these genetic cousins are likely not closer than third cousins.

With the "old" site, I could request sharing of any match, though most did not respond.  Responses were often bizarre and irrelevant.  Maybe one day I will feature the most notable in a blog post.

Buy more kits from a site that has been stuck for almost six months?  No thank you.  My latest autosomal tests have been at FamilyTreeDNA and uploaded to GedMatch.