Check the witnesses

Something drew me back to a branch of my DAWE family that emigrated to Quebec.
I'd not found anything conclusive about them after the 1881 census of Montreal.
This time round the Drouin collection showed an Emma Elizabeth DAWE marrying an Alexander COWAN in Montreal in 1890. unlike several marriage entries her parents weren't listed, and as I didn't have an Elizabeth in her name, the identification was tentative.
Witnesses: J A & Katie SMART.
That sounded familiar.
Back in 1881 a lodger in the household was one Julius SMART.
Took a few short searches of the Drouin collection to turn up a marriage of Emma's sister, Catherine Thomasine Mary DAWE, shown as daughter of Nathaniel DAWE & Catherine nee WATTS, witnesses Nathaniel DAWE, and Isaac Nathaniel DAWE (Catherine's father and brother).
So at least father, sister, and one brother Nathaniel had all survived beyond 1881.
Subsequently Catherine and Julius SMART & family, have been found up to 1911, parents Nathaniel and Catherine, with son Isaac were found in 1891, indexed on ancestry as DANE, then parents in 1901, but not a sign yet to be found of Alexander and Emma Elizabeth COWAN after their 1890 marriage - anyone know what happened to them?

Photo with legs

And it's up and running!

Found that someone had entered my great grandfather George Gibson ("Gibb") ANDREWS onto Geni, and there was a photo attached.
As I don't have one of him, I was rather interested in this, but somehow it didn't look right.
A bit young for my guestimate of the date of the clothes?
So investigations began.
The trail quickly leads back to a large number of MyHeritage trees, all with the same photo - but checking the actual photo, it is labelled William G ANDREWS, and their source was generally "copied from a smartmatch".
Several have now removed the photo agreeing that they'd simply copied it from a smartmatch without checking, but the assumed owner, the one with an actual William G ANDREWS in his tree who had died the same year as Gibb, but in Christchurch, has not yet responded to confirm that his is the original photo.
Jury still out, but I know where my vote lies.

Must be 4 or 5 years since ...

Somehow my McADIE branch always seems to get attention every 4 or 5 years.
Time's up.
I've been having fun checking out loose ends, merging duplicates in my database and seeing what else might now be around to identify who belongs to whom.
Only some 140 without an identified family to go (if I don't add more strays whilst digging)!

Along the way I have managed to finally connect up the James, married to Isabella BRUCE, living in Victoria (AUS) as definitely being the son of George & Elizabeth (ROSIE) McADIE.
As he was living "near"  Robert, who would be his brother,  it seemed likely, but now the proof has been found.
As were the necessary dots  to join up the Western Australian branch who had moved there from Victoria.

Need to figure out who William in Ararat  in 1874 is now - is he another brother? Or is their brother William the Customs Officer in London?
Or does he belong to Donald & Janet (MURRAY) McADIE, at least one of whose sons was also in Victoria (AUS)?

This time round I'm trying harder to find others who may be interested enough to help find direct male line McADIEs interested enough in the jigsaw to represent their line in the McADIE (and variants, which are legion) Surname DNA project to prove that all those lines from Watten are indeed closely related, even if we wont necessarily learn exactly how. Some of the other Caithness lines have descendant charts on my McADIE page (still under development).
Any direct male line McADIEs out there interested in seeing if they're a match to the representatives so far?
Failing a direct line male, how about a descendant willing to try a Family Finder test to see if we get a match to those of us who have tested?
Love to hear from you - see any of the above pages for contact info.

Loose end tied up

Over the years I'd often idly wondered whether or not there was a connection between my BAIN ancestors from Caithness, and those of a BAIN family with origins supposedly from Caithness, who lived in my childhood district (Central Otago, NZ).
Failing a connection to mine, what about one to the other BAIN family who also arrived in Dunedin about the same time, give or take 10-20 years, in the 1860s/1870s?
Attempts at connecting the latter BAIN family, that of William and Jacobina (MANSON) BAIN to my BAINs had failed, but we did end up connecting them, distantly, by the MANSONs.

The Central Otago BAINs worked back to a William, butcher, brought up in Kaikourai, Dunedin, emigrating about 1857 from Wick with his parents.
His marriage certificate said his parents were a George & Jessie BAIN and the most likely candidate was George Traill BAIN in Dunedin, BUT George and Jessie hadn't married until 1864, which didn't really "fit".

This week an idle web search brought up an article in the Otago Daily Times (the Dunedin paper) about a BAIN family reunion last year for descendants of George Traill BAIN and included a snippet that George had emigrated with wife Elizabeth, dtrs Catherine and Margaret and son William, in 1862 on the Silisia, wife and an infant dying on the voyage. George's cousin Janet later coming out to look after the children, and then marrying George.
Bingo.
This was sufficient information to identify the likely family as being that of William BAIN & Catherine SUTHERLAND of Thurdistoft (1841) then Tain (Catherine, 1851).
A fellow member of the Caithness Family History Society's message board had provided their 1841 census details some years ago, and it included Margaret, Catherine and William, of the right ages.

After all that it doesn't look as if they're likely to match my BAINs of Latheron (Clashscribie), but it was a satisfying loose end tied up.

How lucky can you get?

Genetic genealogy, aka using DNA testing to (dis)prove theories and relationships between family trees, can be the luck of the draw.

Does anyone actually still exist that would be eligible for the appropriate test?
Has anyone with the right surname and genes tested yet?
Were the any mishaps down the generations between the shared ancestors?

You may recall the story of what happened when I voted at our local body elections a year or two back.

There is now a sequel.

Since then John has been back to England and met up with some of his newfound maternal grandmother's relations, but the GOVIER connection was still unproven/unsolved.  Was he actually a GOVIER by descent or in name only?

DNA testing, and a match to a GOVIER descendant of the Pitminster (Somerset) GOVIERs would be a great start to confirming that his step-grandfather was his actual grandfather despite the grandparents marrying in the year following his father's birth..

Along came a suitable price reduction in the entry level test for Y-DNA. This was enough for John to venture forth, with a bit of prompting. We had even found a couple of potential candidates from the Pitminster line to contact if necessary.

He was cautioned that at 12 markers it was more likely that he would get a number of matches from a variety of surnames, and that it really was only the start of the process, unlikely to be at all definitive given that such matches share an ancestor hundreds, if not thousands of years ago, rather than within genealogical time frames.

The Y-DNA12 results arrived today.
How many matches - one.
Surname - his.
Most distant ancestor - the same William GOVIER of Pitminster Somerset.

I'm not sure I want to suggest further testing and see this match fade away as the markers increase!

 

WorldConnect

Given that updates seem to be flavour of the week, my RootsWeb WorldConnect db LornaHenderson has also been updated. It will therefore contain the last 4 months of updates to all those connected to my extended tree, along with some pockets of connections to those connections.
BMDBs (Births, Marriages, Deaths, Burials) as usual, plus this time Census events have been included, date and place only.

As before,  for source information you will still need to contact me to find out where the information shown was obtained. This is because the older source data has never been re-examined to ensure nothing private is inadvertently shown, eg email addresses, dates for living people.

There's one less "orphan", ie a person known to be connected somehow but not where or how.
However the definition of "sister" on a US immigration form proved rather loose.
I'd not been able to fit a sister, supposedly Mrs T C JENKINS, into the family concerned (Marshall METHERELL) and up to now had also not found the "sister" in the US census.
This time round I investigated Marshall a little more and found a second marriage, and a child in the Pennsylvania records - where the sponsors for the baptism of the child were Thomas and Jessie JENKINS.
Seemed too much of a coincidence. This time, with first names now available, Mrs T C JENKINS has been found, and identified as Jessie DAVEY, so  rather looks to be a sister of Marshall's first wife Ann DAVEY, instead of Marshall's sister.

When is an update not an update?

When it's the 20th April and shown as such on my Recent Changes index.
All of those listed as "updated", with the exception of James ROWE and Jessie SUTHERLAND, are behind the scenes tidy ups with no information added.
James is there as his baptism and burial information have been checked, found wanting, and updated.
Jessie because her death in Victoria, Australia has now been found.