The X chromosome and its family history surprises

I learn recently that the X chromosome contains no material from a man’s father and none from your father’s father if you are a woman.  This leads to the curiously imbalanced chart below, which you will spot contains a Fibonacci pattern.

Table 1.  This table shows the contribution ancestors make to the total (pair) of X sex-chromosomes for a female: I have italicised the female’s father’s contribution.

In my family, the female (my mother)’s F-M-F-M-F-M (father’s mother’s father’s mother’s father’s mother)and F-M-M-M-F-M, are by complete coincidence, the same person, Elizabeth Cock born 1770 in Gwithian Sands, Cornwall.  Elizabeth accounts for three-eighths of the material on one of my mother’s X chromosomes, and thus three-sixteenths of my X chromosome.  This is either 12 or 24 times what she ‘ought’ to contribute being only 1 out of my 128 5xgreat-grandparents.

My X-chromosome is made up of my mother’s two X-chromosomes combined.  My Y-chromosome has been passed down from father to son, down to myself, so my father did not pass on to me an X chromosome.

My sisters have a second X-chromosome, from their father, which is made up of their paternal grandmother’s two X-chromosomes combined.  A stonking quarter of this comes from one lady, Ann Charlton, born 1785 in Whittonstall, south Northumberland, our 4xgreat-grandmother.  She is their F-M-F-M-F-M.  As there are 64 people in this generation, Ann is oversubscribed by a factor of 16, or of 8 – if you treat this X-chromosome as being strictly on the paternal side.  Were Ann to have other son’s daughter’s son’s daughter’s son’s daughters (which she does, the Embletons), we could in theory identify genes on the chromosome for which she was responsible.
As the pair of sex chromosomes are only 2 out of 46, the fact that some grandparents did or didn’t contribute makes very little difference overall.

I, Miss Dinah Widdows

As told to...

I, Miss Dinah Widdows do note the pitiful number of descendants which I have left. You can find many in family from my husband’s daughter Grace. Her poor mother died at 27 but she still has more in family than I.   I have lately been spending a month or more getting acquainted with them, and golly me, it took me by surprise to meet them all. I did not think they expected to see me, a lady born in 1712, one hundred years before Waterloo.  I also took a moment to look at my sister Sarah's family but I didn’t keep up with them. No sooner I contacted them then had another infant been born. They do say as one of her descendants is born every single week that passes. I don’t know. I can’t imagine looking at the girl why nature works so.  Now you will probably all be thinking that I am own sister to Martha Widdows, and you may know all about how she died, done in by her rotten husband.  Ha!  Well you would be wrong and mighty awkward it is navigating around the tree, I must say. Why I could barely find a record my even having been alive. Which I surely was, an I brought up that ungrateful Sarah and the silly brothers the Lord cursed me with. You would have to be a magician to know that I married George Dyke but even guesswork won’t tell you my father’s name. Oh no that is one secret which is very well kept. And if you find out where I was born well I wish you’d tell me. But no, I must grudgingly admit I am not of any genealogical consequence whatsoever.  I had 2 or 3 very good grandchildren, I let them disappear from the records without trace. I tried asking the earth but I’m not getting any answers, even my other sister who never fussed about getting married, even she managed to produce grandchildren who stayed in the records. Oh well tut tut. You see there are matriarchs or fat old queen bees as I call ’em! Even among Sarah’s offspring.  But what’s this I see.  A GenesReunited message saying my grandson George got off his hindquarters and sired a massive breed?  And now here’s FindMyPast trying to tell me granddaughter Martha went off and kept an inn in Emeld Empsty.  And Google shouting that the US Ambassador’s wife was a Miss Dyke, one of George’s lot.  That’s something little Miss Sarah can’t boast about.  Well now I can sleep in peace.

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Dinah and Sarah named in the will of Edward Murrow, Almesforde, Somerset 1732.  Lots of information about Sarah, but nothing on Dinah.

What a difference a decade makes

Censuses can baffle.  A happy family all living together in 1871 in Kyo, Durham were topsy-turvy in-between times and all squeezed up together with barely any shared constituents in 1881.  The surviving thread was Sarah Ann Southern.

1871 Kyo, Durham
William Southern, wife Ann, child Sarah Ann

1881 County Durham
Ann Southern (widow), daughters Sarah Ann, Elizabeth Ann

It appears the two Anns were the same, but no!  The ages nor the birthplace, neither match.  Ann was the *second* wife of William.  So in the space of ten years - a child had been born, the first wife died, a second wife arrived and the father died.  Whew - good going Southerns!

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In Norfolk, Maria Haythorpe's long-awaited death fails to appear, she marries John Brown moments before her death and he remarries, it seems even as the clock chimes the census enumerator's visit.  Not a clue left of that brief relationship.

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In Cornwall, Elizabeth Davies of Hayle helpfully lived with her aunt Sally the entire time, who had a rare name and made pinning them down pretty easy.  One of her daughters married in Dorset, and we're still hunting the other one (Mary).  Elizabeth herself doesn't reveal her death easily - till we find that she too made a deathbed marriage, and is buried under this name - without passing a census year on the way through.
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Picture my surprise at learning our respected uncle Joseph Carline was at the centre of a bitter custody battle over a deceased infant when he was very definitely a grandfather and a widower - or so I thought! Kindly Joseph was a widower in 1861 and on 1871, but not in-between. He'd raced up the aisle of crooked spire Chesterfield church knowing that any child he produced would inherit the sickly bride's lands, even apparently if it later died. He got to work and by 1871 the whole episode had gone, wife, son, land, Chancery case. Until I hauled the surprising paperwork out from the Cheshire mine some time last year. Curiously, his actual grandson a Ford worker at Dagenham was given the infant heir's name and died fairly recently.
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In Somerset, widow Ann Brown was happily living with her children Frecia and Effie and others in 1871.  Ring - bong - all change.  In 1881 the family have apparently reconstituted as:
1881 Ditcheat: William Stride, wife Rachel, stepchildren Annie and Ellen Brown!

What exactly has happened in between!  Only three events have happened this time 'tween the enumerators' call, though we have apparent name changes to deal with. Can you tell what's gone on?

Diocese of Durham wills go online at FamilySearch

I was able to go back one or two generations with my Gibsons of Colwell Farm, Chollerton, up north of the wall in Northumberland.  The diocesan wills covering the period from late mediaeval times up until 1857 were indexed some years ago at North East Inheritance, a University of Durham project, and for years there was no news at all, as the original publication date of 2010 receded deeper into the distance.

The will of my ancestor Lancelot Gibson the first, dated 1789, proven 1794, show show brutal the choices were for people.  His eldest son having died, the widow was given the choice of arguing that the farm should go to her son, or taking the money with a large number of conditions - children were to be well behaved with a keen eye watching them from age of 14 upwards; Ann was not to remarry; she was to conduct herself and not to ever challenge the ownership of the family farms.  Then, and only then, when the boys reached 21 they would get £50 between them and the girl would get a fiver.  In addition though, Gibson would provide for their education (if warranted) and give them somewhere to live.

This useful document ties together a number of the family, and finally explains who Lancelot Gibson Dobinson was.  I'd noticed him in the GRO indexes, but a cursory investigation, which must have been extremely cursory, ruled him out as being of interest.  How wrong was that!  He is a great-great-grandson of Lance the first.

Another useful dataset well worth waiting for.

Dates of birth from 1900 to 1916

Unless you're very likely and have inherited the family's birthday book with all the birthdates of everyone who ever popped in to say hello, birthdates can be hard to find.

Birthdates are helpfully given in the indexes of deaths taking place here since 1969.

Why are they useful?  Well, take my relative Jessie Smith.  By finding her birthdate (from the London parish registers at Ancestry), I was able to pick out her death entry very easily, even though she had got married and changed her name in the meantime.

I've used a birthdate to help prove people are related, including Caroline Jones who lived to be over 100 - I was initially rather suspicious of this, but the family bible confirmed the birthdate given at her death.

Another source of birthdates was published last month, the names of minor children given when soldier's registered to fight (Enlisted) in World War One.

Among those was William Chappell of Penzance, whose daughters' birthdates are both given.  Also Charles Chipperfield of London Docklands - in this case the daughters' birthdates helped me bypass the fact they married under subtly different names.

Grandmother's special connection with her son's daughter

There's a few articles explaining why a grandmother is specially close to her son's daughter.  The granddaughter has 1 pair of sex chromosomes (so 1/12 of the total) and of that pair, one of those (1/24 of the total) is an exact copy of her grandmother's.  An X chromosome has been passed down intact through the two generations.

It's calculated in total the granddaughter has 26% of her DNA from her paternal grandmother, not much extra, but a little extra closeness built in.  A quick look seems to suggest that the little girls only get 24% of their DNA from their father's father, but I've not verified the numbers.  However they often get his surname, so hopefully that balances it all out a bit.

image from: http://genetics.thetech.org/ask/ask435

Nice animation on unrelated genetic topic about flies: http://www.dnaftb.org/11/animation.html

Facebook's useful experiment for family historians is closed

In 2012 Facebook offered you the chance to message its users for 65 pence, if they were not already your Facebook-friend.  I found this pretty useful and sent messages off to my future housemate (who didn't know me), plus a new cousin in Sydney and one in rural Massachusetts.

The pennies spent guaranteed my Hello would reach their Facebook inbox and not go to a hidden folder.

I had great responses from Sydney and rural MA, and consider it money better-spent than had I dusted down the stamps and posted a big long letter.  In the event, the cousin in Sydney never replied to the Facebook message, but tracked me down on my website and sent me an email.

So a good experiment. Update, 2015, it's back and boy have I made use of it.

Newspapers

Following from my day of industry, that just leaves the British newspapers, which gave my some surprising results.

I couldn't store any of the researches I'd found onto memory stick.  The full-text articles I quickly pasted into a textbox on my website to get it back easily later.  I memorised the rest, and will at some point go back and get hold of the snippets.

* Joseph Barnett's death notice 1856 described him as a man of industry and integrity
* Henry Smith posts a notice in the local paper about his wife Ann, two years after marrying her, that he is not responsible for any additional debts she incurs
* William Giles Collins is shown to have had considerable financial support (£800) from his father-in-law James Compton of Kingston Deverill (whose eighth daughter he had married) and, his latest enterprise having failed, and not having a job, he was allegedly living in Bath with a married woman.  The wife arranged to have him found and for maintenance for his family.  He said he had a mind to 'hook it to America' - indeed he married a Bristolian girl out there the very next year (1873).  He was back in Somerset by 1881 and staying with his mother; his two wives were elsewhere!
* Cornelius Collins, his brother, by contrast, was a denizen of virtue.  It may be he that was considered for funding to go to Bruton Boys' School in 1846 (then age 10).  He's described as the son of a widowed farmer's wife; but he lost out on this occasion to a Master Peacock.
* Charles Carline, my forebear who was a policeman in and around Ilkeston, Derbyshire.  He was on the edge of arresting fisticuffs, with criminals telling him that 'no policeman in Derbyshire can arrest me!'.  He was still very young (21) and faintly noble, but likely turned to drink which probably cost him his job and then he got a girl in Eyam pregnant (unclear what he was doing there - possibly estate managing) and came to Salford.
* Joseph Carline, Charles's uncle, is confirmed as having had a brief second marriage in 1861, in between the censuses so quite easily missed.  (His marital status remains widower by 1871 and there were no surviving children.)  He married at Chesterfield parish church and the issue of the marriage was subject to a Court of Chancery action, which I have already seen.  The Chancery index said it was a Yorkshire case, but I recognised the surnames involved and knew that not to be true.
* John Johnson, farmer of Old Town, Catton, Allendale gets several mentions in the Newcastle Courant.  At his death (1885) and also as the official who people wrote to: for example, he was told that cattle plague was coming and he should close his show, but the advice turned out to be incorrect.
* Mrs Mary Collins Tayler, the saddler's wife from Catherine Street, Salisbury has a fairly lengthy obituary in a Hampshire paper at her death 'on New Kent Road', London in 1835.  She was a granddaughter of the murdered Martha Tucker and her seven affectionate children went a good way to strengthening the female line of this family, perhaps because of their determination to respect their womenfolk.
* The South African papers courtesy of the Readex portion of NewsBank.com let me see the two soccer-playing Cotty brothers (Syd and Victor) one of whom was injured in a mining accident around 1907; the marriage of Charles Commins Haine was reported at length in 1907 at Germiston, his brother L. P. being best man.  I'm more convinced than ever that the assault of a young white girl in Kimberley 1913 led to the assailant assuming his mother's name, and also of the family likely moving away to Pretoria.
* Properties were sold - Mr William Lain's estate in 1832 was subdivided: including his public house The Three Boars at Spooner Row, and one heir was Samuel Flowers; Giles Grist's property at Faulkland was sold about 1845 (he'd been suffering from ill-health in 1840).  Flowers's daughter was confirmed as dying at the Boar i.e. Blue Boar, Walsham-le-Willows, which had been saved from fire and now serves Thai food.

These are just the highlights - there will be other discoveries that I didn't note down but which will prove to be useful.  All found from the Newspaper eresources page of the British library.

The other snips were the bootlegging of alcohol in 1907 by Charles and Jose Dunkerton (his wife I believe) in Fort Scott, Bourbon, Kansas.  Also the appearance of the enigmatic Miss Melisande Bell as a child in 1910 in Tanglin, Singapore dressed as a red pierrette.  Her father was the Postmaster-General.  She would later be thanked by Philip Ziegler for her information about the Duchess of Windsor in his biography.  The Straits Times archives are online.