Several years ago we joined Ancestry.ca to try to unravel the complicated story of my darling husband’s lineage. We were able to trace his maternal grandmother’s family back two more generations. We found the immigration records of her parents coming to Canada from Russia (but claiming German heritage) via Liverpool on the HMS Pretoria in 1907. To go any farther back we had to join Ancestry.com. We were able to find my husband’s great-great grandfather in Russia, born in 1844. That was pretty exciting. But it was the end, the records got too hard to follow.
We had nothing to go on to trace his maternal grandfather. His name was John Smith and we had no other identifying information. You can imagine the endless results of a general search for a “John Smith”. My husband’s father was adopted, so that line was totally untraceable. My husband took the Ancestry DNA test and we linked the results to his meagre family tree. Well, that got results. First we received a message from an older gentleman listed as a possible second cousin. His tree contained many Smiths, even a J. Smith, but he couldn’t find any other information to help us. We thought maybe our J. Smith was a son or cousin not directly in this gentlemen’s line. We knew there were relatives out there but we couldn’t find them. So, our search was stalled again. Then, a message came through that changed everything.
A woman contacted us to say that her grandfather’s second wife was Dale’s grandmother, and her grandfather’s name was John Arthur “Archie” Smith. Well, the world of Ancestry.ca and Ancestry.com opened wide with that information. I found Archie’s death certificate, his marriage records, his father, and his grandfather and so on and on. On Archie’s direct paternal line, I was able to go back to Thomas Smith, born in 1800 in Ireland. That would be my husband’s third great-grandfather. I was able to go farther tracing both the paternal and maternal lines of some of my husband’s relatives. I found an eighth great-grandfather born in Alvescot, Oxfordshire, England in 1646 and a fifth great-grandfather born in County Monaghan, Ireland in 1752. This line of the family had a son transported to New South Wales, Australia. He was convicted of treason, for speaking out against the English rule of Ireland. He left grown children in Ireland that continued the family line. In my search I was not able to find when the people in my husband’s family came to North America. The names are too common and the dates unreliable, but they got here, and I can find them. Most moved to Ontario.
On the Canadian census documents, my husband’s grandfather’s family considered themselves Irish. My husband’s DNA profile shows that 56% of his DNA is from Great Britain. The direct DNA connection to Ireland is small, so the ancestors I found there must have roots in England.
The upshot of all of this is that my husband, who once felt like he couldn’t determine his place in the world, has a huge family tree. He reconnected with his two cousins, who were thrilled to hear from him and to learn about their common grandfather and their extensive extended family. But the best part is this, our younger son is getting married soon. His fiancée’s father is Scottish and he’s wearing a vest made of his family’s tartan to the wedding. Well, the Irish have tartans too, not based on clans but on counties of birth. So my husband was able to order a vest made of the Monaghan tartan. And we now have places in Ireland and England to visit, where we can check parish records and wander through cemeteries looking for family names. My darling husband went from someone who knew nothing about his mother’s family and who couldn’t find out anything about his father, to someone who has a family tree that goes back to the mid-1600s. Rather cool.