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.

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

Finding Lottie

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). 

Helen McCleece Anderson and daughter Helen Vondersmith Anderson, circa 1905

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.

Reginald B. Anderson, wife Edith M. Anderson, daughters Ruth, Helen & Edith, circa 1915

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.

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.

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.

23andMe Results

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:

Charity's younger brother, Christopher Fisher

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.