Sunday, June 26, 2016

Photographs in a Series Reunited

A cousin kindly sent me some more family photographs.  (Thank you D.W.!)

A snow scene caught my eye.  My aunt had given me a similar picture a few years ago of a couple standing in snow, the woman holding a snowball.

These people are still unidentified.  Based on who inherited these pictures, they come from the Walling and Winterton branches of the family tree.  They lived in the Keyport area of Monmouth County, New Jersey.

In an earlier article, I compared an identified photograph from a cousin to unidentified photographs I received years ago and determined that they are from the Walling and Winterton branches.

The pictures and heirlooms handed down through the generations are analogous to DNA.  Each child receives different bits of the parent's DNA and passes the different parts down to their descendants.

My branch received some tools from David Uhl (1834-1884), while a cousin received other tools, all marked with UHL to signify the common origin.

Saturday, June 18, 2016

German Y-DNA Match

My father finally has a Y-DNA match at Family Tree DNA.

Both my father and the person who is a match tested 37 markers.  His surname is not Lutter.



(Another person tested 111 markers, but there are too many differences to qualify as a reportable match beyond 12 markers.)

FamilyTreeDNA did not report this new person as a match at the 37 marker level.  When I compared the actual numbers, they have five differences out of 37.  The values are off by only one for each difference.  Without testing additional cousins from these lines, we have nobody else to compare to determine if this man and my father might share a common direct paternal ancestor.



This other person has roots in Germany.  He can trace his direct paternal line to about 1830, which is how many years back I can get on my Lutter line.  His line originated in Treppeln, Brandenburg.  Mine was from Scheibe, Thueringen.  Treppeln is a few miles west of the current border with Poland and is about 180 miles northeast of Scheibe.  If I have the correct Treppeln.




Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Family Tree Repair: O'Donnell, Part Three

The revision of the ODonnell branch of the family in Indiana tree continues with the acquisition of death certificates.

Here are some pictures of this branch to be shared with the world, courtesy of an ODonnell in Ireland.

Rose and Agnes ODonnell were first cousins of my great grandfather, Frank ODonnell.



Father Charles Carey was the son of Agnes ODonnell.


Using the entries for this branch at FindAGrave.com, I requested the death records for the couple Neil (Cornelius) ODonnell, died 1909, and Mary ODonnell, died 1924, from Howard County, Indiana.  Neil's record was found; Mary's was not.  As I was preparing this article, Ancestry.com published actual images of Indiana state death records with an index.  Mary's state record of death was in this collection.  Neil's was also found, but his name was mangled in the index as "Damerell" instead of ODonnell.

























Please note that Mary ODonnell's parents are listed as Peter ODonnell and Margaret Gallagger [Gallagher].
This is consistent with the records of Mary's siblings, Rose and Patrick.



John James ODonnell (1882-1914), a son of Neil and Mary, is featured at FindAGrave with a former date of death of 1930.  The current administrator of his page corrected the year of death to 1914 at my bequest.  John was an acrobat in the circus.  He died in Warren, Warren County, Pennsylvania.  Ancestry.com has a collection of Pennsylvania death certificates and John's match beckoned to me as a quivering leaf in Family Tree Maker.

[This is the second person found so far who worked in the circus setting.  My great grandfather's second wife, Fiorita Lorenze (1890-1969) did "the wire act on a bicycle."]









"Circus acrobat expires.  John O'Donnell of the Wallace-Hagenbeck Shows died in P[ennsylvania]."





A search of the Indiana death certificates reveals one for a man named John ODonnell who died in 1930 in Kokomo, Indiana and was buried at Crown Point Cemetery.  But he was not the John ODonnell who was the son of Neil and Mary.  This illustrates the perils of working with common names.




The online family trees have corrected some errors but not others.

We now know that Mary was herself an ODonnell.
Her mother was Gallagher.




If only New Jersey would place its death records online . . .