All the world's a stage: Spotlight on Broadway Actor Edwin Nicander

Nicander Edwin Rau
date unknown, possibly 1920s
Source: NY Public Library

Edwin Nicander

(23 Dec 1876 - 1 Jan 1951) 

        Just before Christmas in 1876, Nicander Edwin Rau was born in New York City to Arnold H. Rau Sr. and Elizabeth "Elise" Dotzert Rau. He was their third and final son. His father Arnold (10 Aug 1843 - 8 Jun 1930) had emigrated from the Prussian state of Germany in the mid-1850s, while his mother Elise (8 Feb 1850 - 7 Jun 1926) was born in New York City to two German immigrants, Johann Georg "George" Dotzert (~ Apr 1825 - 10 Dec 1901) and Elizabeth Kraemer Dotzert (1828 - 5 Jan 1898). Edwin was my great grandmother Margretha "Margaret" Dotzert Speer's (31 Jul 1890 - 25 Mar 1967) first cousin.

Margaret Dotzert Speer, circa 1912

Edwin's father Arnold was a hotel restaurateur, a profession which was in line with the profession of his father-in-law George and perhaps how he met Edwin's mother Elise. 

In 1880, the family was living at 83 West 11th Street in the West Village. This exact street address doesn't exist anymore, but based on the current street view, the location was likely part of the large brick building on the corner.

Corner of West 11th and 6th Ave, West Village

In June 1887 when Edwin was 10, Arnold Sr. applies for a passport along with his three sons. They note that he has a dark complexion, prominent nose and high forehead and stands a modest 5 ft 6. 

Passport Application dated 9th Jun 1887 NYC

A short while later we can see Mr. Rau traveling with his three sons, Arnold Jr. (12 Jan 1870 - ?), Horatio Washington Arnold (22 Feb 1872 - ?) and Nicander Edwin (aka Edwin), as well as one Miss Rau (perhaps Elise or perhaps Mr. Rau's sister Caroline) on the SS Servia of the Cunard line. The Servia went into service in 1881 and ran between Liverpool and New York until 1901, when it was sold for scrap. It was taken apart the following year. SS Servia is considered to be the first modern passenger ocean liner and was quite luxurious for the time (the first with electricity on board!) so we can infer that the Rau family was doing quite well in the restaurant business.

Cover of Passenger List for Voyage
18 Jun 1887

S. S. Servia model Science Museum South Kensington
Source: Hugh Llewelyn, Flickr

No family records of this trip exist so it's hard to know exactly why the Raus headed to England that summer, though it is likely they traveled to Germany to see relatives after they arrived.

By 1900, Edwin and his brother are living with their parents at 13 Bank Street in the West Village. This historic Greek revival brownstone was built in 1852. All three sons are single and listed as "restaurant keeper" along with their father. However, Edwin had taken up acting about 6 years prior based on several newspaper records I've unearthed. In a somewhat bizarre coincidence, it turns out that infamous Hollywood producer and rapist Harvey Weinstein apparently bought 13 Bank Street in 2006 and then listed it for sale for $25.6 million dollars in 2018 after his legal troubles began.

Source: Town & Country magazine

The first citation of an actor called "Edwin Nicander" can be found in a Louisville, Kentucky newspaper on 27 Jan 1896. Young Edwin is playing a character called Gustave Alphonse (and received 4th billing) in a play called "The Vendetta". It's clear from the article that this was a traveling acting troupe, headed by W.R. Ogden, which moved around the country, as the article cites performance delays due to a train mishap coming from Cincinnati. 

The Courier Journal, 27 Jan 1896

But when did young Edwin begin acting? A later article in the Boston Globe says that he's a six year veteran of the stage, which would put his debut around 1894 when he was 17 or 18. It does look as though there was a little age flubbing going on already though, as Edwin should have been 23 almost 24 at the time the article was published.

The Boston Globe, 11 Nov 1900

There's a 20 year gap in the Rau family's history as I have yet to find any of them in the 1910 census, but the early 1900s show quite an uptick in newspaper articles reporting on Edwin. Between 1896 and his death in 1951, there were 1295 newspaper articles with the name Edwin Nicander. I have yet to confirm they are all about him about him, but by 1907 there are mentions of him on Broadway and the peak of the articles corresponds to 1900-1929, the era he was most active in the theater.

Edwin at 26 years old
Source: Evening Express, 24 Nov 1903

By the 1920 census, Edwin lists his profession as theater actor and he is still living with his parents, aunt Caroline and unmarried brother Horatio in College Point, Queens. In 1930, he resided at another Queens location with his very elderly father and aunt Caroline as well as a servant, still listing his profession as stage actor. However, based on the significant drop in newspaper articles about him by 1930 it appears the roles had mostly dried up for 53 year old Edwin. So much so in fact, that when he began appearing in his last Broadway play in 1938 (Kiss the Boys Goodbye) a journalist wrote about him having an 8 year lull! He was noted as a "short, serious, pleasant little man". Oof.

Source: Philadelphia Inquirer, 29 Oct 1939

In spite of his likely industry forced retirement, Edwin still listed himself as a "theatre actor" in the 1940 census and lived with his widowed brother Arnold Jr in Queens. They remain living together in 1950 in Queens, but Edwin's entry states that he is "unable to work". The entry also notes that he never married. This census was taken on 18 Apr 1950 and Edwin would be dead in less than 9 months time.

Source: Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 3 Jan 1951

It's hard to know exactly how many shows that Edwin acted in by the time he retired from the stage in 1939, but the Playbill website cites 29 Broadway shows between 1910 and 1938 and IMDB has a few earlier shows dating back to 1900. Although I don't know exactly when his brothers' Arnold and Horatio passed, I suspect it was before Edwin as only his nephew Thornwaldsen Arnold Rau (19 Sep 1889 - 26 Dec 1956) is mentioned in Edwin's obituary. T. Arnold had two sons, one who died while in college and the other who appears to have remained a lifelong bachelor like his uncle Edwin, thereby ending this line of the Dotzert family tree.

"Jack Straw", 1908
Source: Manuel Palomino Arjona, Flickr

"Good Gracious Annabelle", 1916
Source: Museum of the City of New York

"Buy, Buy, Baby", 1926
Source: Museum of the City of New York

NOTE: Edwin's last play "Kiss the Boys Goodbye" was popular enough that it was made into a Hollywood movie in 1941 starring Don Ameche and Mary Martin and the title song was wildly popular as well.

Cold Cases and Genetic Genealogy

I first had the idea for this blog post 2 years ago, but life got in the way so I saved my references and forgot about it. As many of you know, after more than 15 years as a high school science teacher, I will be starting a new career as a forensic investigative genetic genealogist soon. Completing this blog post feels like the best way to explain what I will be doing professionally without divulging any specifics of my own employment. That being said, I want to begin by telling you a story...

Rahway, New Jersey circa 1910

Imagine being able to travel back in time to early spring 1887. On a chilly Friday morning, March 25th, in Rahway, New Jersey, four brothers headed to work at the nearby Clark felt mills came across the body of a young woman who had been brutally murder. Her body lay on the side of the road near the Central Avenue bridge (not far from the intersection of Central and Jefferson Aves), a large pool of blood frozen on the ground beside her. Her face was extensively bruised from a severe beating, her hands bore defensive wounds, but perhaps most shockingly of all, her throat had been cut twice from ear to ear. 

Rahway New Jersey, 1887 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map

Now homicide was unusual in this area in 1887, especially one so violent. Add to this the fact that the victim, estimated to be in her early 20s, was said to be very pretty, with dark hair and light eyes, and well dressed and you had an instant national obsession with the mystery.

A sketch of the victim, published in April 1887 (source: National Police Gazette)

There was a lot of wild speculation about who the young woman was and where she'd come from - her time of death was likely the evening before and she was not terribly far from the train station which made Rahway easily accessible from other parts of New Jersey and New York City. Despite the murder weapon being recovered near the body as well as multiple large shoe impressions around and leading away from the victim, a dozen or so personal items of the victim recovered from a handbag found in the river and many eyewitness statements collected over a long investigation, neither the victim nor her murderer were ever positively identified. To this day, the victim is simply referred to as the Rahway Jane Doe. 

Reward for the Suspect, equivalent to about $18,750 today

A homicide that is unsolved for a long period of time in known as a cold case. The reality is that with each passing day, week, month, year or decade, the probability of solving that cold case diminishes significantly. However, law enforcement does not stop investigating these cases, as there is no statute of limitations on prosecuting a homicide or identifying a victim. Unfortunately due to limited resources, these cases can languish if there is no substantial new evidence or information available to the detectives.

National Institute of Justice Cold Case DNA Program

In 2008, direct to consumer genetic tests began to be marketed to the public, largely by US startup 23andMe. These tests give customers the opportunity to learn more about genetic variants they'd inherited, match with previously unknown genetic relatives and learn more about the places in the world their ancestors likely came from. All that was required was some spit in a tube, but initially the tests were quite costly. Our own family had quite a few genealogical brick walls that could only be solved using DNA, but I didn't have the money to spend so I waited and watched. By 2013, the price had come down to a much more reasonable $99 so I jumped in. Ancestry.com is the largest paid subscription genealogy company and had been for a long time when they decided to dip their toe into the genetic testing waters in 2012. With a well established paying customer base, their database steadily shot past the number of clients in 23andMe's database. It is currently the largest database of its kind globally, with over 22 million users.

DTC Genetic Database Growth

Adoptees and genealogists with problematic tree branches were the first to recognize how powerful comparison of family trees with known genetic relatives could be for uncovering the identity of previously unknown individuals. An entire subculture of genealogists developed to cater to folks with unknown parentage and the term "genetic genealogist" was born. Fast forward to 2017 in California when the cold case investigator Paul Holes working on the so-called Golden State Killer crimes (13 murders, 51 rapes and 120 burglaries) got a clever idea. He'd learned a bit about genetic genealogy through his own family research and wanted to know if the same technique could work for finding the suspect. His initial attempts to find a suspect where not particularly successful so he enlisted the help of Dr. Barbara Rae-Venter (ex-wife of Craig Venter, the head of Celera Genomics, which was the private company to first sequence a human genome in the early 2000s). Dr. Rae-Venter has a PhD in biology as well as a law degree, doing both research and patent law in her career. Since retiring, she's worked full time assisting law enforcement on cold cases. 

It's extremely important to note that law enforcement agents cannot directly access the paid subscription genetic databases like Ancestry or 23andme. Instead, investigators rely on accessing GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA's databases, which allow people to upload their raw data from other companies into their database to try to find matches across testing platforms. Also know that users can opt out of allowing law enforcement to see if they match DNA from a crime scene. So here's how things played out in California...

Are you ready for some sobering statistics? According to the NIJ, there are approximately 240,000 unsolved homicides in the United States. According to RAINN, there are over 290,000 victims of rape or sexual assault per year in the US - that's a new victim every two minutes. According to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons Systems (NamUS), approximately 600,000 people go missing every year in the US. About 90 percent of those people are recovered within a year (dead or alive), but still for a staggering number of families there are no answers. Over 4000 unidentified bodies are recovered each year. Several organizations (i.e. DNA Doe Project) focusing on identifying these John and Jane Does have been successful in crowd sourcing funding to get the necessary genetic testing and genealogy done. But we have a serious identification problem in this country - one that can be made better through adequately funding the expansion of forensic investigative genetic genealogy.

As you and your loved ones consider taking DNA tests through Ancestry or 23andme or any of the other myriad of sites, please seriously consider contributing your DNA to GEDmatch and opting in to law enforcement seeing your matches. This tool is only as good as the size of the database - the fewer people in the database, the longer it can take to crack a cold case.

As far as Rahway Jane Doe, the local police department is still open to collecting tips. And who knows? Perhaps one day, someone will raise the money to exhume her body to get a DNA sample so that she can be returned to her family at long last.

The Origin of Our Name

In 1922 when my grandfather John was born, his mother Charlotte was not married. At his birth, she listed him as having the last name Philipps, though he wouldn't know that until 1950. 

In June 1925, Charlotte was living with her mother Margaret, her two brothers and Grandpa Jack, though he was listed as John King. He's also listed as son of Margaret, which was obviously not true since she was 68 year old at the time.

King Family, 1925 New York state census

By January 1926, Charlotte had married Lester Rothrock. They moved to New Jersey and later Charlotte gave birth to two more sons, William "Bill" and Richard "Rich". Charlotte and Lester presented Jack as their mutual son and he used the name Rothrock. Later when the truth came out, Charlotte would tell Grandpa Jack that she selected the last name for his birth certificate because it was a common last name in the neighborhood she lived in when she got pregnant. She told him she chose it because she wanted to deflect from the fact that his father had been a married man. She used his real first name Gilbert, but chose a last name she was familiar with. 

Our last name is Philipps, which is an unusual spelling variant. I have always assumed Charlotte had guessed at how to spell the more common Phillips and simply made a mistake. But today when I was looking over old NYC records because of the new free digital index that went live this week, I noticed this in the 1915 state census.

King & Philipps Families, 1915 New York state census

The King family lived next to a Philipps family - matriarch Sarah Philipps with two sons, potential suitors for Charlotte (who was actually 20 at the time of the census)! The spelling of our last name was no doubt an intentional nod to this family. The irony is that 66 years after this census, Charlotte's second great granddaughter via Jack would be born as Sarah Philipps. Kismet, perhaps?

Charlotte Helena Mary King Rothrock, 1915 @ Coney Island

Ethnicity Guestimates

Probably the biggest draw of direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies is their ethnicity or ancestry estimates. But if you've ever tested with multiple companies or known someone who has, you might have noticed that the results are not the same from company to company. So let's get this out of the way now - those ethnicity estimates are just estimates and likely to be wrong. You cannot be certain of the geographic origin of your ancestors by looking at a single DTC genetic test result. That doesn't mean that the information can't still be useful or interesting - but more on that another day. For those who haven't bought a test yet, let's use my results as an example to understand why these discrepancies in ethnicity estimates exist. I have tested on both 23andMe & Ancestry, as well as uploaded my 23andMe raw data to the MyHeritage database (which is free).

23andMe Results

According to 23andMe, I'm 46.5% British/Irish, 17.4% French/German, 7% Broadly Northern European (which also would be associated with being British/Irish and French/German), 24.5% Italian, 0.5% Greek/Balkan and 2.8% North West Asian (split between Anatolian aka Turkish and Cypriot).

Ancestry Results

According to Ancestry, I'm 40% Irish, 19% English/Northwestern European (which they say includes parts of France, Belgium and the Netherlands), 19% Scottish, 11% French, 7% Northern Italian, 2% Cypriot, 1% Middle Eastern, and 1% Germanic. 

MyHeritage Results (using 23andMe data)

According to MyHeritage, I'm 27.5% North/Western European (which encompasses France and Germany), 21.8% Irish/Scottish/Welsh, 18.7% English, 14.2% Greek/Southern Italian, 9.9% Italian, 2.2% Balkan, and 5.7% North African. So what gives? 

One of the first things to notice is that each company carves up the globe differently. They have decided to cluster geographic areas differently, which can account for a big chunk of the ethnicity estimate differences. For example, 23andMe doesn't separate Scotland or Wales from their British/Irish estimate, but Ancestry lumps English ancestry with Northwestern Europe, while MyHeritage is considering North/Western Europe to include the same places as Ancestry but also France and Germany which both 23andMe and Ancestry separate out. Since there's not an easy way to compare the percentage of my DNA associated with single countries directly between the 3 companies, let's just count the percentage of my DNA that seems to have come from England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Netherlands, France, and Germany: 23andMe says that's 71%, Ancestry says that's 90%, and MyHeritage says that's 68%. Now we have a better agreement between two of the companies, but it's still not a concordance. So how does that compare to what I know about my family after more than 25 years of paper genealogy research?

Each person has 4 biological grandparents and will inherit roughly 25% of their DNA from each grandparent (NOTE: it is possible to inherit slightly more or less DNA from your grandparents due to the random shuffling of DNA that occurs when parents make their egg and sperm). My father's father was born to two people who were half English and half Irish, so he was likely 50% English and 50% Irish. My father's mother was born to a 100% German mother and an English/Welsh/Dutch/French father so she was likely 50% German and a 50% mix of the other 4 places. My mother's father was born to a Scottish/Irish father and an English/Irish/German/Dutch mother. My mother's mother was born to first-generation Italian Americans - all their family that I can trace to back to the mid-1850s lived in Southern Italy. This grandmother's DNA on both 23andMe and Ancestry suggests she's about 80% Italian and the rest is a mix of Greek/Cypriot or North West Asian.

For simplicity's sake, let's just focus on a small bit of my ancestry - the German/French/Dutch bit. We can guess that my dad is about 25% German and that I, in turn, should have gotten about 12.5% German DNA from those ancestors, but I also could have inherited some German DNA from my mom's side of the family, as well as French and Dutch DNA from both sides. This means that estimates from 23andMe and MyHeritage are probably pretty accurately gauging those populations. But Ancestry saying I'm more French than German doesn't make a lot of sense based on oral family history and my paper trail. It was interesting to me, however, that each company was capable of confirming some of the locations I know my ancestors to have emigrated from: Ancestry notes an association with Roscommon in Ireland, 23andMe identified Campania in Italy, and MyHeritage linked me to Aberdeen in Scotland.

So why are there sometimes significant differences between companies when your DNA obviously doesn't change? It's largely due to the fact that each company uses its own proprietary method of assigning DNA segments to different geographic locations in the first place. However, each method relies on a similar approach. Basically, the company will select a group of people currently living in a particular geographic location who are deemed to have "pure" DNA for that area to serve as a reference for all the people who test with the company. If you are found to have DNA that matches with a particular reference dataset, they assign that segment to match that geographic region, and then they tally all your DNA segments to give you the ethnicity estimate. Since each company selects its reference populations differently and clusters geographic areas differently, it is impossible to get complete concordance between companies. If you want to learn more about these methods, check out this on 23andMe, this on Ancestry and this on MyHeritage. (And if you really want to get into the science, read the white papers from 23andMe and Ancestry - I couldn't locate one for MyHeritage. Some of the reference sample sets are shockingly small.) And if you need more helpful visuals on this topic, check out the video from Vox below.

So you want to find your biological family?

Maybe you grew up with your biological family and you just want to know more about where they came from before they settled in the States. Maybe you were adopted and want to know more about your biological history. Maybe you never knew who one of your biological parents was because of an unusual circumstance. Whatever the reason, you want to know more about your family’s past and direct to consumer DNA testing can help to sort out fact from fiction. Please understand that when you undertake genetic testing you may find out things that are surprising or even upsetting to you or other people in your family. There’s a saying among the genetic genealogy community - “People lie, DNA doesn’t”. If you aren’t ready to confront possibly uncomfortable truths, direct to consumer DNA testing probably isn’t for you. But that being said, if you are ready to take the plunge and get some answers, here’s a step by step guide to how to begin to unravel your results.

1. Decide which company to test with.

There are several companies available for genetic testing for ancestry in the States. The largest three are Ancestry.com, 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA and MyHeritage. If money is no object, I would recommend testing with all companies as they each approach ethnicity calculations a bit differently. However, if you are looking to match with previously unknown relatives and you have a small budget, Ancestry, by far, has the largest database. CeCe Moore runs a volunteer genetic genealogy group on Facebook called DNA Detectives and the group there has created a handy flowchart to help people navigate the decision-making process. I also made a slide presentation for my students last December to go over this process too.

2. Test and then upload your results to other sites to maximize matches.

Even if you only have enough money to order one DNA test, you can get the most bang for your buck by uploading your raw data to sites like GEDMatch, MyHeritage and FTDNA. You should never assume that your genetic relatives will definitely have chosen the same company to test that you have or that everyone who does DTC testing is aware of all these databases. So don’t get discouraged if it takes a while to find really useful matches. GEDMatch is a database that was created so that users who had tested across the different platforms could find genetic matches even if they didn’t use the same company to test. Plenty of other folks have raised concerns about the use of these databases by law enforcement to identify suspects or victims in cold cases so I won’t get into that here, but suffice it to say that all of these companies give you the option to prevent law enforcement from using your data. 

3. Interpret your results.

This is the hardest part of the process if you are a genealogy newbie. First of all, please understand that all companies attempt to estimate the relationship between individuals in their databases by saying things like second cousin or third cousin. Many people don’t understand the terminology that genealogists use so that alone is confusing. Then on top of that, those estimates are often missing nuance that would actually help you figure out the relationship between you and your unknown matches. So to begin - let’s look at how to determine relationships.

Most people know that their first cousins are the children of their parents’ siblings. First cousins share a set of grandparents. People tend to get confused when they hear things like “second cousin twice removed”. When someone says removed, they are talking about differences in generations between the original person being studied (you) and their relative. So for example, the children of my first cousins are my first cousins once removed because I am the same generation as their parents. My cousins’ children are my children’s second cousins because they share a set of great grandparents. But don’t get too worried about this terminology just yet…

To sort out the genetic relationship between two people the most important thing to know is how much DNA they share. Humans typically* all have a total of 46 chromosomes or 23 pairs of large DNA segments. (*I say typically because some people have extra chromosomes as in the case of folks with Down syndrome.) We each inherit one set of 22 autosomes or non-sex determining chromsomes from each parent as well as one sex chromosome (X or Y) from each parent. Males get their X chromosome from their mothers and Y chromosomes from their father, while females inherit an X chromosome from each parent. Scientists measure DNA segments using a unit called centimorgans (cM), named for a famous fruit fly geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan. The total amount of DNA you have among all 46 of your chromosomes is about 7400 cM. Since you inherited half your chromosomes from each parent, you will have about 3700 cM in common with them. The reason I say “about” is because sometimes the DTC labs don’t get complete coverage of the SNPs across your chromosomes so it may appear that you share a little less DNA. Thankfully, a lot of very smart people have been analyzing the data from DTC genetic testing over the past 10 years or so and there are several charts and tools to help you better understand the probability of a relationship between you and a newly discovered relative. I strongly encourage people to use the cM tool on DNA Painter.

The more closely related two individuals are, the more DNA they will share. Most folks don’t get lucky enough to find a lot of super close genetic matches right off the bat, but that’s OK. Remember that each person has 8 great grandparents and 16 great-great grandparents. If you know what you are doing, matches in the second and third cousin range - people who share those great or great-great grandparents with you - can answer most questions. 

Now that you have some background knowledge, here’s where the real work of sorting out relatives can begin. It’s important to figure out what matches you have in common with your newly discovered relatives so that you can figure out who your shared common ancestor was. Genealogist Dana Leeds developed a simple visualization method using an Excel spreadsheet a few years ago - now called the Leeds method. You can use the same approach to compare matches across platforms or try out some of the online tools that have been developed to help cluster matches for you (Cluster Mapper or CLM).

4. Build a tree.

You will need a place to keep your research organized. Digital family trees are the way to go. I use Ancestry.com to house my tree (which has over 14k people in it after more than 20 years of research), but that’s not free. You can also set up free family trees and search a ton of records on FamilySearch, the genealogy site created by the Mormon church. MyHeritage also hosts family trees. If you have money but don’t have the time or energy to develop the tree yourself, you could look into hiring a genealogist to do it for you. There are quite a few helpful tutorials available on YouTube to give you an idea of how to start building trees incorporating your genetic matches (Building Quick & Dirty Trees to Identify Genetic Matches, How to Create a Floating Tree and Merge Duplicates on Ancestry.com, Next Steps For Using DNA to Find Unknown Ancestors or Parents of Adoptees).

5. Don’t get discouraged.

It takes a lot of time and effort to sort out some family mysteries. Sometimes you just don’t have enough decent matches to answer the question you have. Other times, you may find that people don’t want to talk to you about their family or your shared ancestor - especially if it means uncovering an affair that resulted in a child. When in doubt, ask someone with more experience to check your work. Be patient and stay positive. You may not get the answers today, but that doesn’t mean you won’t have them down the road. Best of luck to you and happy hunting!

Old School Genealogy - Finding the McCarthy Clan

Back in 1994-1995, my paternal grandfather John "Jack" Rothrock Philipps revealed to me that his mother had him as a single parent in 1922. Great Grandmother Charlotte told him on her deathbed that his biological father was named Gilbert McCarthy, a married traveling salesman from Boston. She'd met him working as a maid in a residence hotel in Manhattan. She thought he was about 15 years her senior and knew that he had a brother named John who was an attorney. But that was all she knew to tell my grandfather. Pre-internet, he'd been unable to find out anything more about his biological father.

McCarthy Coat of Arms & Motto: Strong, Courageous and Swift

At that time, our family had one basic desktop computer that we all shared in our finished basement. I'd convinced my mother to get me a genealogy software program for it so I could start building a family tree. I'd also convinced my parents to get AOL dial-up service after playing with it at my best friend's house. The internet was like the Wild West back then - websites and chatrooms were rudimentary. Very few genealogical records were available online at that point. I spent about a year or so scouring the internet for genealogy message boards, reaching out to every McCarthy from Massachusetts that I could find.

Eventually, one woman wrote me back (I'm embarrassed to say I don't remember her full name) and told me that while she did not recognize a Gilbert or John McCarthy in her tree, she lived not far from Boston and often went to the state archives to pull records for her own tree and that she would be happy to try to find my Gilbert. A short while later, she emailed me back and said she thought she had found them. Because my great grandmother was born in 1894, we had guessed that Gilbert was born around 1880. She looked through all birth records between 1850 and 1910 for a Gilbert McCarthy. Amazingly, there was only one - Gilbert Joseph McCarthy, born October 11, 1875 in Orange Massachusetts. 

Orange as it would have looked in Gilbert's youth, map from 1883

Gilbert was listed as the son of Michael F. McCarthy (1830-1912) and Rosamond "Rosanna" Mary Monaghan (1844-1908). Michael and Rosanna were both born in England to Irish parents and emigrated to the US in the late 1850s or early 1860s. They met and married in Fitchburg, Massachusetts on October 2, 1864. Michael initially worked in mills around the state to support their growing family. Later, he became an iron molder. Gilbert was the fourth of nine children. Their oldest son John Francis McCarthy (1873-?) was only two years older than Gilbert and census records listed him as an attorney. So far there were two pieces of my great-grandmother's story that aligned with the paper trail.

The path of the McCarthy family around Massachusetts

Then my research helper floored me with another detail - she'd found Gilbert's death record as well. He had died on August 27, 1938, when my grandfather was just shy of 16. The cause of death was listed as tuberculosis and his last address was listed as Tewksbury Hospital (which now houses the country's first public health museum). His occupation on the death certificate was salesman and he had a wife named Marion. Every piece of the story matched perfectly. I thanked Ms. McCarthy and told my grandparents I wanted to meet with them in person to tell them something.

I believe this would have been around the spring of 1997 - we did not yet know that Grandpa had lung cancer at this point. He had not had the knee surgery that would reveal the cancer and my grandparents were still living independently in their house at 457 Knoll Road. I was in my first year of college so I drove myself to their house and we sat in the living room in front of the big bay window. I quickly relayed what our Massachusetts research angel had found. 

My grandparents' house on Knoll Road

My grandfather seemed relieved. "So he was already dead when we tried to find him? That makes me feel better about not finding him then. I'm glad to know a little more about him. I still wonder if he knew I existed though." Then he thanked me for giving him some answers. For those of you who didn't know my grandfather - a demanding, stoic man - this was a rarity, acknowledgment for a job well done. Later that year around July, we learned that Grandpa had a slow-growing lung tumor. We were told he had at most two years left, to get his affairs in order, maybe take a family trip... None of that happened though. He passed away about two months later on September 23, 1997. 

In the twenty-plus years since then, I have continued to research Gilbert and his family, never knowing for certain that he definitely was my great grandfather. When I was in grad school in CT in the early 2000s, I decided to take a weekend road trip to MA. I drove around Orange and ate dinner there. Then I visited Tewksbury Hospital, where a very kind docent pulled up Gilbert's hospital records (he was only there 2 weeks before he died) and took me out to the cemetery where we found his marker (a non-descript series of letters and numbers on a stake). She assured me that it was actually unusual for the graves to have a marker at all since the cemetery was not maintained for many years. Somewhere I have a picture of the marker that I took that day with a disposable camera.

As far as I can tell, Gilbert only had one other child than my grandfather - a daughter named Mildred, who was born prematurely in 1904 and died a few months later. The circumstances around her birth and death are also a bit mysterious - her mother is listed as two different people on the birth (Ella F. Moore) and death (Mary O'Brien) certificates just 4 months apart. I suspect her real mother was listed on the birth certificate but since she was young and not married to Gilbert, another name was used for the death certificate to hide the illegitimacy. 

My grandfather's older half-sister, Mildred McCarthy

I've also tracked the descendants of Gilbert's siblings in the hopes that one day we would have genetic confirmation of our link to the family. I sent my spit to 23andMe in 2013 and then paid to have my father's DNA analyzed there too. I uploaded our DNA to GEDmatch and waited patiently for a McCarthy descendant to match. Finally, about a year ago, we matched to a woman who is the great-granddaughter of Michael Leo McCarthy (1880-1961) - one of Gilbert's younger brothers. According to the tree I'd worked out, that makes her my father's second cousin 1 time removed (2C1R) and my third cousin (3C). The amount of DNA my father shares with her is within the normal guidelines of the number of centimorgans expected for a 2C1R. So yes, Gilbert Joseph McCarthy was definitely my grandfather's biological father.

More recently, I enjoyed finding articles on Newspapers.com from the turn of the last century when my great grandfather Gilbert was a young man about town in Boston. He was apparently an accomplished actor and singer on the amateur circuit, along with a couple of his brothers. 

Gilbert and brothers James and John were the leads in a play in June 1900.

The closest thing to a picture I've found of Gilbert!

So in the end, my grandfather was the son of two children of immigrants - English/Irish folks who came to the US in the mid to late 1800s looking for a better life. Grandpa always told me his mother's family was from the Cork area of Ireland and historical records show that Gilbert's father was from Cork. My DNA results do confirm ancestry from that region, as well as the Galway and Dublin areas. Before COVID hit, Rich and I were planning to take Griffin on a one week tour of southern Ireland to see all the places our ancestors had lived. Once we can be vaccinated, we will schedule the trip again. After all, we are...

Strong, Courageous and Swift

The Mystery That Started It All

I've had a love affair with genealogy for over 25 years that I can trace back to a single school assignment. When I was a sophomore in high school, my English teacher required us to create a family tree. I'll be honest and say I don't remember the context of how it related to what we were studying in class, but I do remember being excited to interview my grandparents about their families. I was fortunate enough to have all 4 grandparents living at the time and even one set of great grandparents. I had also known another great grandmother who passed when I was 8 years old. What I didn't know when this project was assigned was that neither of my grandfathers had grown up knowing who their biological fathers had been. I diligently worked on my school project and was able to go back many generations on my paternal grandmother's family, but for both grandfathers, there was precious little information. I was frustrated and intrigued.

The mystery of my paternal grandfather's birth actually changed the course of our family history significantly - in trying to find the truth, my grandparents had adopted a new name. I can still vividly recall sitting with my father's parents in their living room near the big front window talking about how we had become the Philipps family. 

My grandparents Jack & Ni, 1995

I always knew my grandfather as John Rothrock Philipps, but he was raised as John Anthony Rothrock aka Jack by his mother Charlotte Helena Mary King Rothrock (1894-1953) and her husband Lester Everett Rothrock (1894-1957). He was born October 2, 1922 in New York City. His mother and stepfather raised him along with his two younger brothers, William Henry Rothrock aka Bill (1927-2016) and Richard Edward Rothrock aka Rich (1939-2020), in Rutherford, New Jersey. After graduating high school, my grandfather enlisted in the army in June 1942. He served in World War II as an airplane bomb site technician - his vision prevented him from becoming a pilot like he'd hoped. After leaving the army, he worked in technical writing and sales. 

My great grandmother Charlotte King Rothrock and my grandfather John Rothrock Philipps, 1943

But back in 1994, all of this information was new to me. Prior to this interview, I had no idea my grandfather had any siblings. While my grandmother talked often and fondly about her family, I had never heard Grandpa say anything about his family.

Rothrock Family in Gloucester MA, 1948

My grandparents explained that our very name was the reason.

It began with their love story. My grandmother Naomi told the story, with Grandpa chuckling and filling in a few details along the way. My grandparents met sometime in the late 1940s through a friend of hers at the bank where she worked. Her friend's husband had known my grandfather in the army. My grandmother was initially resistant to being set up because she was 7 years older than Grandpa, but she relented and they had a good first date. So good, in fact, that my grandfather proposed at the end of the date. My grandmother told me she thought he was crazy and didn't take the proposal seriously. A relatively short courtship followed and on December 31, 1949, my grandparents were married in her mother's home at 72 East Passaic Avenue. They were married as John Anthony Rothrock and Naomi Speer Rothrock - their wedding bands engraved with their initials. I suppose I looked incredulous so they took off their rings and showed me. 

How had they gone from the Rothrocks in 1950 to the Philipps in 1951? 

It was because of a fight, my grandfather said. Apparently, he had a somewhat tumultuous relationship with his parents - his stepfather had been abusive to him while he was growing up and there were frequent arguments. He didn't tell me the details of the fight - perhaps he no longer remembered them himself - but what Grandpa said was that he was having an argument with his parents not long after his marriage and they blurted out that Lester wasn't really his father. My grandfather was 28. He said he was hurt and he was angry. He decided to take action. 

So he went to New York City and requested a copy of his birth certificate. I remarked that I was surprised that he had never seen it before since he was an adult and had served in the Army. My grandparents told me it wasn't common for people to have copies of their birth certificates back then - that they weren't necessary for obtaining other forms of ID. When he got the certificate, it listed his father as Gilbert Philipps. My grandparents then mulled over what to do with this new information. They were still very upset about the fight and were considering changing their names to match the birth certificate. They talked to some friends who were attorneys and were told that they could call themselves whatever they liked without going to the court to change it. After all, the birth certificate said he was John Philipps, not John Rothrock. My grandfather settled on John Rothrock Philipps, dropping his former middle name and adopting his stepfather's name in its place. This decision in and of itself probably wouldn't have shattered his family of origin if he'd gone about telling people in another way.

Remember the saying "Hurt people hurt people"? Well, still angry and feeling spiteful, my grandfather announced his name change at the wedding of his younger brother Bill in November 1950. 

And that was the end of his relationship with his parents and his brothers. He was cut off. I have no doubt he felt righteous indignation about the situation and felt he had no reason to apologize. Even now writing this story down 70 years after it happened, I feel sadness for everyone involved. When my grandfather died from lung cancer in 1997, my grandmother told me she'd tried to reach out to his brothers to tell them the funeral details. She said they'd responded that they were sorry for her loss, but it didn't really affect them because they hadn't had a brother for so many years. It didn't have to end that way. But I digress...

Great grandmother Charlotte at Lake Walkill, NJ 1952

A few years later, my great grandmother Charlotte got sick. It turned out to be terminal cancer. My grandfather went to see her in the hospital as she was dying. They said their apologies and expressed their love for each other. And then she dropped the last bombshell - Philipps wasn't really his biological father's last name.

She wanted to be completely honest with him since she knew she didn't have much time left. Great Grandmother Charlotte told him that his name was Gilbert McCarthy and that she had met him while she was working at a residence hotel as a maid. He was a traveling salesman from Boston. His best friend was his brother John, who was an attorney. She thought he was about 15 years older than her. And it turned out he was married, which is why she made up a last name for the birth certificate. She selected Phillips because it was a common last name in her area of New York - but she misspelled it as Philipps.

It's not clear to me if Charlotte knew Gilbert was married during their affair and I don't think it was clear to my grandfather either. My grandfather was not sure if his mother ever told his father about her pregnancy, if he'd ever known he was born. My grandparents said they knew they weren't going to change their names again after the revelation - they'd already named my Aunt Peg - but they did want to see if they could find Gilbert. My grandmother Naomi volunteered for the Red Cross during World War II. So back in 1953, she reached out to those old contacts to see if they could find Gilbert McCarthy. They didn't get anywhere and eventually dropped it. Since this was 1994 and the everyday use of computers and the internet was becoming more of a thing, I was convinced that I could find Gilbert.

And I did. But that is a story for another day.

💕 Happy 71st anniversary to my grandparents, Naomi Speer Philipps and John Rothrock Philipps.💕