Where Do The Small-percentage Family Lines Come From?

A couple of years ago, I sent off to have my DNA checked for ancestry not health, as millions of us have, while I make the climb up my own family tree. When the results came back, I was not surprised to see the highest percentage of English DNA, 56%, a small percentage from Ireland (22%), and an even smaller percentage from Scotland, 11%. After all, both my paternal grandparents hail from Yorkshire, England, my maternal grandfather's lineage starts in Ireland, and my maternal grandmother's ancestors are from Scotland via Quebec, Canada.

What surprised me and for which I had absolutely no explanation was the small but measurable, DNA from Sweden, 2 percent. 

I have no recollection of any family history or stories about relatives from Sweden, I do not have any bodily resemblance to any Swede anyone has ever known, and there is no reason it should be there except this: If we go back far enough, all of us are most likely related to almost anyone else. That explains the less-than-one-per cent DNA from Africa. That is where the human race began all those eons ago. 

Having no reason to spend energy on something I could not explain, or even conceive of a reasonable explanation, and for which I found absolutely no evidence I gave no thought to my own Swedish connection other than believing that somewhere along the line, there might have been an ancestor who passed that way. I stopped looking.

Until January 24, 2021.

That was the day I found the Swedish connection in my family tree. Admittedly, it is way up and way out on one of those small branches that are only seen in the best weather. In this case, the first of my ancestors who came to this country is John Albert Anderson, born 10 Feb 1877, in Lindome, Halland, Sweden. 

He is the "uncle of the husband of a 1st cousin 1x removed of the wife of a 2nd cousin." This is what that looks like in lineal form, starting with my biological mother at the bottom:

Talk about way up and out there! But no matter how remote or far removed from my known ancestry, John Albert Anderson is the first relative of mine from Sweden to arrive in the USA. That would explain the percentage of Swedish DNA I have as not merely chance, but a real blood connection, no matter how long the lineage is between my mother and him.

While I am still working on verifying when he arrived in the USA and how--a very difficult process because "John Anderson" is a very common name, as you can imagine, and this is the first time I have verified that I even have a Swedish connection--I have verified that he took up residence in Worth County, Iowa (though I have not learned who his initial point of contact was), became a US citizen, registered for the World War 1 draft--I do not yet know if he served in the military--and he died in Iowa at 66 years of age in May 1943.

And I thought the most exciting discovery was finding that one English ancestor who had been knighted, Sir Whatzhisname! Who knows? I might just find a very-distant connection to someone in Africa, too.

More Discoveries As I Climb my Family Tree

I have been away from this computer and blog for a very long time. There have been no posts for almost a year. Obviously, there is a reason; life has a way of diverting the paths of rivers and the direction of the humans living on Earth. That was the case with me and I hope to make good on my promise of more regular posts.

This post has to do with realizations I have come to in the past couple of weeks while visiting my daughter and grandchildren in cold, rainy, snowy Maine. This first-in-a-while post will not be too long but I hope it will be informative for anyone newly interested in genealogy, the process of climbing your own family tree. First, a short lesson in basic biology.

Every human has two parents. Each of those parents has two parents, and so on. In my own lines, the names of those humans are Wilkinson and Batty from my paternal side and Burke and Thompson from my maternal side. But each of those names will have different names since tradition had the women take the man's name. In the Burke case, the female line's name was RAYMOND.

In genealogy, each line deserves attention to detail; in my case, that is critical because of a lack of accurate information from my childhood. (In other posts, I have described how wrong I was about some early beliefs and how little information I have from my parents and grandparents - none, really.

To recap quickly, I thought my maternal grandfather was from Ireland and his wife, my grandmother, from Scotland. My beliefs were wrong on both accounts and I have verified (a very important step in genealogy!) that my maternal grandfather's line has a long history in northern Massachusetts. In fact, in the mail just this day, I received documentation that my 7X GGF (7th great-grandfather), WILLIAM RAYMOND, was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, in 1666, and he died there in 1709. I believe, though I have not completely verified, that my 8X GGF, WILLIAM RAYMOND was the first of my maternal grandparents' line to arrive in this country. According to my preliminary information, he was born in Glastonbury, England, and came west during the Great Migration, settling in Massachusetts Bay in British Colonial America, where he died in 1709.

I have not learned how he got here; whether he was a passenger on the Mayflower or another ship is part of my current research. As you can tell, picking one grandparent that I knew and following her ancestral path back to its origin leads to all kinds of new amazement.

And to think it all started when I learned her son, my grandfather, did not come from Ireland!

It has been more than a year

It has been a year since I posted an entry to this blog. What I was doing is not relevant to my genealogical search, but it did take me away from it. I am now back and hope to rekindle the readers I have. Let's get started.

Here is what excites me about #genealogy and working on my family tree.

As you might recall from earlier posts, I knew very little about my grandparents' emigration into this country in the early 1920's and some of what I thought I "knew" turned out to be completely wrong. For example, I always thought my maternal grandfather, JOHN FRANCIS BURKE, was an Irish immigrant who was married to my maternal grandmother, NINA THOMPSON BURKE, an immigrant from Scotland. 

None of that turned out to be correct.

My Grampy John was a born-and-raised U.S. citizen from New Hampshire with a New England lineage going back at least two generations. Likewise, my Nana was not from Scotland at all. I have no idea how that "knowledge" came to me, but she was born and raised in Quebec, Canada, and her lineage is Canadian going back a couple of generations, too. 

Those misunderstandings misdirected my attention as I started my climb up my own family tree. Being a novice with no formal training or education in genealogy, instead of focusing on one person at a time, I started skipping around trying to make sense of things. 

If you are just beginning to work on your own family tree, that is an inefficient way to work. You might populate your tree with erroneous information because something seems to make sense and/or you skipped or did not verify some fact.

So I reoriented my thoughts and actions and began looking at one person or family unit (husband and wife, for example) at a time. Doing so has been productive for me. I also expanded my sources; I have been a long-time subscriber to the big genealogy site, Ancestry.com, but doing so has limited me in some ways. Recently, I reactivated a 'free' membership to Family Search, another large genealogy repository based in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is associated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS) and has given me some data points, including documents, that I did not have from Ancestry.com.

While I was looking for birth documents from my maternal great-grandmother - finding birth certificates has been Challenge #1 for me - I discovered something I had not found on Ancestry.com. (By the way, as I mentioned above, the maternal side of my family hails from the United States, so finding information about them is much easier.) A quick trip to the Family Search data immediately pointed to a birth certificate for my Great-gramma Burke, BERTHA JULIA RAYMOND, who I knew as an 8-year old boy before father and my family left the United States for his original posting in Jordan. (I never saw her alive again until we returned for the only burial I have ever attended...hers.)

The birth certificate I found was not hers; I am still searching for that. It was for a stillborn baby boy she had on August 12, 1905, in Wilton, New Hampshire. But that is not even the 'ah hah!' moment for me - stillborn children were very common in the early 1900's in a very small town in rural New Hampshire. The eye-opener was the entry on the line marked "No. of children, 1st, 2d, 3d..."

8th. Yes, eighth.

Does that mean my great-grandmother had at least 8 children? Was it a code used by the physician? I have not answered those questions yet. Up to this point, I know of only five ancestors ... my grandfather and three of his brothers plus the one stillborn boy. Where there three more? If so, who were they? Finding definitive records on stillborn babies is challenging.

There is something else, too. The only stillborn baby relatives I have identified are males; did my great-grandmother give birth to any girls? Where did this stillborn baby boy fall in the lineage? Are there more than eight? That is possible since large families are common in my past - my maternal lineage is Roman Catholic.

I now have other questions to answer in the search for branches and leaves on my family tree. More questions mean more searching, validating, wondering, pondering ... and, of course, more than a bit of frustration. 

As I have said before, finding these exciting clues to previously unknown people is what makes my climb up my family tree so exciting and rewarding.

DNA: What should I do with it?

DNA is all the rage in genealogical research these days. The expense of DNA testing has dropped significantly while the accuracy has increased substantially. As more and more people offer their samples untilfor testing, the databases increase, thus presumably increasing the accuracy even more. Combine the voluntary samples that we family tree searchers submit with the not-so-voluntary sample submitted by law enforcement agencies worldwide and you have a very large database of information.

Information, however, does not become actionable (as a retired CIA officer I know called it) that information is assigned some value. Today, I will show you what information my DNA results have given me and what I do with it to make it actionable, if anything.

I grew up pretty much knowing my roots were in Great Britain and Ireland. Though my search has clarified many false understandings - whether of my own misunderstanding or from misinformation given by my ancestors - my general search has been and continues to be in that part of Europe. 

When I received my first DNA results a few years ago, results which continue to be updated, albeit with minor changes, as the DNA database increases, I was fairly surprised to read the information. 

• Before I continue, let me tell you I am a retired federal investigator, not a DNA scientist. I have not spent a lot of time studying the whys-and-wherefores of genetic science, through I did take many related science courses in college.

Here is what what AncestryDNA says about my genetic past, by percentage, high to low.

Great Britain (34%)

• Primarily in: England, Scotland, Wales
• Also in: Ireland, France, Germany, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Italy

The history of Great Britain is often told in terms of the invasions with different groups of invaders displacing the native population. The Romans, Anglo-Saxon, Vikings and Normans have all left their mark on Great Britain both politically and culturally. However, the story of Great Britain is far more complex than the traditional view of invaders displacing existing populations. In fact modern studies of British people tend to suggest the earliest populations continued to exist and adapt and absorb the new arrivals.

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Europe West (33%)

• Primarily in: Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein
• Also in: England, Denmark, Italy, Slovenia, Czech Republic

The Europe West region is a broad expanse stretching from Amsterdam's sea-level metropolis to the majestic peaks of the Alps. Geographically dominated by France in the west and Germany in the east, it includes several nations with distinct cultural identities. From the boisterous beer gardens of Munich to the sun-soaked vineyards of Bordeaux and the alpine dairy farms of Switzerland, it is a region of charming cultural diversity.

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Ireland (28%)

• Primarily in: Ireland, Wales, Scotland
• Also in: France, England

Ireland is located in the eastern part of the North Atlantic Ocean, directly west of Great Britain. A variety of internal and external influences have shaped Ireland as we know it today. Ireland’s modern cultural remains deeply rooted in the Celtic culture that spread across much of Central Europe and into the British Isles. Along with Wales, Scotland, and a handful of other isolated communities within the British Isles, Ireland remains one of the last holdouts of the ancient Celtic languages that were once spoken throughout much of Western Europe. And though closely tied to Great Britain, both geographically and historically, the Irish have fiercely maintained their unique character through the centuries.

The first thing that surprised me was that Ireland was not combined with Great Britain. The more I thought about it, however, it made sense. Millions of our ancestors, mine included, hail from Ireland, not England. Considering the expanse of the British Empire and the political nature of Great Britain over history, not separating them out would have skewed the numbers to an almost-meaningless degree.

But still, that leaves 5% of my DNA from what Ancestry's DNA calls "trace" areas: Africa (2%); Eastern Europe (2%); and Asia (1%). Though these percentages are low enough individually to be considered scientific chance, taken together, the 5% raises questions in my mind, especially considering the diversity of the findings:

1. Why do I seem to have a greater "tie-in" to Africa than any other geographical area, including one very close to my primary area? As far as I know, I am 100% Caucasian.
2. How can I have as much African DNA as Eastern European?
3. If not by chance, which ancestors of mine began the journey from the African Continent to the European Continent? When? And why?

These are  two of the many questions I look to resolve. Perhaps the answer is related to mathematical chaotic behavior. Perhaps merely scientific chance. And because the nomadic nature of humans over time is more or less documented, perhaps some of my very-distant ancestors, those that I have not even begun to think exist, came from Eastern Europe or Northern Africa.

Who knows? The search is the reason for the journey!

My family tree - and why and how I do this

This is the kick-off entry to my new Wilkinson Family-related blog. I want to give you, my reader, some background and an sense of where I hope to take this.

First, me. I am neither a professional nor a trained genealogist. Like many others, I am interested in my own family's history. As I age, where I "came from" becomes more important and because my parents and grandparents left no written records of their own past - no family Holy Books, for example - I am left to my own devices on how to discover my past.

I come from two immigrant families, Burke/Thompson (my maternal line) and Wilkinson/Batty (my paternal line). From early childhood, I believed all four of my grandparents emigrated to the USA during the early part of the 20th Century, a time when millions of Europeans came here to settle and work. My grandparents came from England, Scotland, and Ireland and like many others, settled in Hillsborough County in southern New Hampshire in basically the Wilton-Peterborough-Lyndeborough town area to work in various mills and factories there.

My purpose is to describe what I have done so far and explain the steps, stops, stumbles, and roadblocks I, like every other person, have and will experience on my trek up my family tree. I have learned interesting facts that support and conflict with what I "knew" about them as I grew up. I will share those in later posts. I hope to inspire other beginner-level genealogists and anyone wanting to learn a bit more about their own history. I hope to trace my journey in some detail but there will have to be some parts left out. I will not clearly identify my children or grandchildren and will do what I can to protect the identity of any living person. That should be easy enough to do because most genealogy sites do not provide identifying details about any living person for obvious security reasons. Going back, however, I will be specific as to names, places, and details I learn. I am open to hearing from more experienced genealogists of all levels, professional or not. If you have tips, recommendations, corrections or other input on my posts, the Comment section is available for your use. I will read each one.

These details become critically important to validate anything one learns. After a 30-year career as a federal investigator, I know "facts" must be verified before they assume any credibility. As online access to genealogy records becomes more widespread, more people create family trees and begin populating them. Some are private and hidden. Some, like mine, are public and visible. The problem comes when a public, visible tree gets populated with inaccurate, unverified information and links. That inaccurate information then possibly gets shared with other family trees, thus spreading erroneous genealogical information. I have experienced that and hope to minimize my own sharing by validating what I can to the best of my ability and within the limits of my resources.

Climbing ones family tree is time-consuming and can be expensive. Depending on all sorts of external factors, the expense and time can be quite burdensome. I am retired and on fixed income, so I am not able to do what I really want to do: travel to Ireland and England to search records and places in person. My expenses come from paying for membership in genealogical record repositories and, from time to time, sending off for copies of documents the details of which are not included in online records I find.

For me, this exercise has become quite addictive. After having done this for a couple of years, I have a much better, though far from clear, picture of my grandparents. As I mentioned, my own ancestors left no records of their immigration and lives and I have precious few photographs. Following the clues to their journey has been frustrating, slow, and always exciting. In my own way, I hope to leave a trail for my own offspring to follow as they age. Hopefully, the trail of breadcrumbs I leave will stay in place and available for many years.