I began tracking our family's history more than 25 years ago because of a project in my high school English class. I spent time interviewing my grandparents about their parents and grandparents and used my computer to draw a tree. One basic tree and I was hooked.
This story is going to focus on my maternal grandfather's family. My grandfather William Anderson's side of the family was complicated - he grew up not knowing who his father was (I'll come back to this story another time) and on his mother's side, there was another mystery lurking: an adoption. When he initially told me about his family, I focused on his mother, Helen Vondersmith Anderson Fredriksen. She was born April 7, 1903 in Passaic, New Jersey. Her parents were Reginald Bertrum Anderson (1878-1939), an electrician, and Helen McCleece Anderson (1882-1907).
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Helen McCleece Anderson and daughter Helen Vondersmith Anderson, circa 1905
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My grandfather never knew his grandmother Helen because she died soon after his aunt Ruth was born. His grandfather remarried Edith McEwen (1885-1980), a Canadian nurse who cared for baby Ruth when she was hospitalized after Helen died. I spent quite a few years tracking both lines of the family, getting back as far as the 1400s in France on the McCleece side. I was extremely pleased with my progress.
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Reginald B. Anderson, wife Edith M. Anderson, daughters Ruth, Helen & Edith, circa 1915
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Then around 2000 or 2001, I sat down to talk to my grandparents about what I'd found and ask for more details. I remarked that it was odd that Cornelius McCleece and his wife Helen Ann Van Riper McCleece had been married for 22 years before Helen McCleece Anderson was born - how unusual it would have been to become parents in one's forties in the late 1800s. My grandparents chuckled and said, "Well, Helen was adopted by the McCleeces. She wasn't their biological child."
After a brief moment of kicking myself for the 5 or so years I'd built up the McCleece-Van Riper tree, I started to get excited about solving the mystery of who Helen McCleece Anderson's biological parents were. My grandparents told me that Helen's birth mother had lived with the McCleeces before Helen was born. Since Helen was born in 1882, I decided to take another look at the McCleeces in the 1880 Federal Census. Sure enough - there was a young girl living with them, Lottie Smith.
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| 18 year old NY-native Lottie Smith listed as "boarding" with the McCleeces |
My next step was to try to find out what happened to Lottie - why would she decide to give the McCleeces her daughter? I will admit all kinds of scenarios ran through my mind - she'd become pregnant by a beau and wanted to hide the illegitimate conception or maybe she'd had an affair with old Cornelius. The truth turned out to be much more mundane, but considerably sadder. It would take me a few more years to unravel it.
A cousin Wendy Litland Rusho (a granddaughter of Great Aunt Ruth) contacted me about the tree I had built and we got to talking about Helen McCleece Anderson's adoption. She said she had a copy of her adoption papers that listed her birth father as Joseph Searle. Once I had his name, it was easy to figure out why Helen had been adopted.
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| Biographical and genealogical history of the city of Newark and Essex County, New Jersey. New York: Lewis Publishing Co., 1898. |
At 26, Joseph Searle was already widowed with one daughter when he married 19-year-old "Lottie Fisher" on November 30, 1881. I noted the difference in last name from the other sources, but figured it might just be a clerical error since there were more references to his bride as Lottie Smith. Less than 9 months later on June 8, 1882, Helen McCleece Anderson was born as Ellen Elizabeth Searle. Then just a few short months later, Lottie Smith Searle died at the age of 20 leaving Joseph widowed with two young daughters. It is not clear how the conversation came up, but an agreement was struck with the long married, childless McCleeces to take the daughter of their former boarder. Almost exactly one year to the day of Lottie's death, Joseph married for the third and final time - Ellen Elizabeth Paxton, with whom he would bear 4 more children. It is not clear if Helen McCleece Anderson was aware of or in contact with her biological father or her 5 half siblings.
While this solved the mystery of who Helen's birth parents were, it didn't help me trace her maternal family. Lottie was no doubt a nickname - for Charlotte I assumed - and Smith was a very common last name. The first clue I had to tracing Lottie's family was her death record - it stated that she had resided in NJ for 4 years before her death. That would mean she arrived from NY in 1878. I began looking at the NY census records for 1870 to find a family with a Lottie or a Charlotte born in 1862. I had two candidates, but I couldn't go any further without more information.
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23andMe Results
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Back in 2013, I opted to have genetic testing done through 23andMe. I downloaded the raw data and uploaded it to as many other genetic genealogy sites as I could - including GEDmatch. GEDmatch has become infamous in the past few years because of its use to help catch the Golden State Killer. Every month or so I would log in, hoping to find a new relative that would help me link Lottie to her family. Last December, I got my Christmas miracle.
On GEDmatch, a man named Tom Fisher shared 41 centimorgans (cM) of DNA with me. [Centimorgan is a unit of measure for DNA; the total cM a person has on all of their chromosomes is about 7400.] His daughter in law Stefanie managed his account and had created an extensive family tree. On the tree, I found Tom's great aunt Charity E. Fisher, born in 1862. Her younger brother Christopher Fisher (1865-1952) was Tom's grandfather, making Tom my second cousin three times removed. In speaking with Stefanie, I learned that the family was not able to trace Charity after 1875 and never knew what happened to her. Here's what I believe the records and the DNA show us:
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Charity's younger brother, Christopher Fisher
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In Saddle River NJ 1858, Rinear (or Rynard) Fisher married Charlotte Sears, the daughter of Moses Sears and Charity Smith. They settled in Ramapo, Rockland County, New York - near the area that Charlotte grew up. The couple went onto have 7 children - Charity was their 4th child and first daughter. In 1878, tragedy struck the family when Rinear died. Charlotte Sears Fisher was left with 7 children between the ages of 10 to 19 and no means to support everyone. The older children were dispersed to live with other people, while Charlotte kept the youngest two children with her. By 1880, Charlotte had remarried, but the family was already separated around New York and New Jersey, never to completely rejoin.
I'm still not sure how Charity Fisher aka Lottie Smith ended up boarding with the McCleece family. It is entirely possible that her father had known them from his time growing up in NJ. However, I have not yet made any distant family connections between Rinear and the McCleeces. I'm also still not sure why or when Charity began calling herself Lottie Smith. Perhaps she was always called Lottie after her mother Charlotte, even though she appears to have been named for her maternal grandmother. Perhaps she chose the last name Smith - that of her namesake - to reinvent herself after being sent to NJ when the Fisher family broke apart. I'm not sure I will ever be able to answer these questions, but I do know that I am satisfied that I've solved the mystery of Helen McCleece Anderson's adoption - 137 years after it happened.
