Kicking off my 2014 General Election ballot is Initiative 591, which prohibits government agencies from confiscating guns or other firearms without due process, and prohibits requiring background checks unless there’s a national requirement to do so.
This initiative is an easy no. We already can’t confiscate guns without due process. A person’s guns have more protection than their houses.
The real goal of the initiative is the second part. The proponents want to prevent background checks. Basically, they want people to be able to sell guns to felons and the mentally ill. Those are the people that background checks catch. Not that background checks catch everyone forbidden to have guns. But it doesn’t make sense to prohibit the checking completely.
Jesse James, half-length portrait, facing front, holding handgun in left hand at his waist
We have another initiative on the ballot on background checks. I’ll post about that one next. In the meantime, remember that these people want to sell guns to known criminals, like Jesse James.
I’ve found a couple of intriguing entries in the indexes to the land records of Grant County. Both of these clipped images are from the grantee index. The first name is the person who purchased property. The second is the person who sold it:
Peter Weiss to Anton WeissPaul Weiss to Anton Weiss
The first is a sale from 25 Feb 1863 from Peter Weiss to Anton Weiss, my second great grandfather. The second is a sale from 14 Jun 1864 from Paul Weiss to Anton Weiss.
What do you think the chances are that these men are related to Anton? I’ve no idea actually, but it’s the only connection I’ve found between Anton and any other person named Weiss, save for the names of his parents in Germany. Are they cousins? Siblings? Completely unrelated? I don’t know. Time to do more research.
The featured picture is in a photo album of images from my great grandparents travels.
I didn’t know how Sister Genevieve Parker fit into my family tree. None of my branches contained anyone by that name, but nuns sometimes adopt new names when they take their vows. Last fall, after I tracked down my third great uncle James Parker in California and some of his family, I suspected Genevieve belonged in that branch of the tree. But where?
I still don’t know exactly who she is, but I know where she fits. To kill some time while I was in California last week, I was doing some unfocused searching for a daughter of James Parker, Mary. I’d suspected she was the Mary Parker who married a Thomas Lyons. I found an index death record that could be her then a copy of the death certificate, and those indeed indicated she was a daughter of James Parker. And today I found a copy of her obituary:
Look in there! Her sister is the Very Reverend Mother Genevieve Parker! And a little bit of Google searching brings up an item on Genevieve Parker from the web site of the Immaculate Heart Community:
Mother Genevieve was elected the first Mother General of the newly established California Institute of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. She guided the Community for nine years. Mother Genevieve was instrumental in securing the separation of the California IHMs from the Spanish Community. The negotiations for independence of the California group went on for several decades. With the help of Bishop John J. Cantwell the separation was completed in 1924. …
She guided the Community as an able administrator until her resignation in 1933. She died in July of that year.
Their web page had this image of Mother Genevieve Parker in 2014:
Pretty much the same person! And now I have a date of death and a pretty good starting point on digging up the rest of her life.
Interestingly, I still don’t know exactly who she is. In the 1870 U.S. Census, James Parker has 4 daughters: Catherine, Mary, Ella, and Frances. In 1880, his daughters are Kate, Ella, Fanny and Theresa. Mary is Mary Lyons. Ella is Ellen Parker Murphy. I suspect Theresa married a Frederick Donaldson, though I haven’t proven that. That leaves Catherine or Frances. At this point, I just don’t know which of the daughters she is.
When I started working on my genealogy, I used Geni.com. Later, I moved my main genealogy tree to my own personal site running PhpGedView. Unfortunately, that software project hasn’t had new features added in years. I also started using Gramps for managing my research and stopped updating the online tree. But that doesn’t work so well for sharing details of my research. I’ve told stories here, but I haven’t updated a public tree.
Today, I finally got a replacement online family tree site running. Instead of the using data from the old site, I exported the data from Gramps and uploaded it. It’s better researched than what I had previously put online.
After 3 years of researching Patrick Parker and his wife Mary Murphy, I have found when they died. The marker for Patrick Parker that I previously found in Saint Mary’s church cemetery, east of Ackley Iowa, is indeed my third great grandfather. His wife Mary died on 13 Aug 1887 and was buried in the church cemetery. Her name no longer appears on a marker in the cemetery. I suspect that it once was on the same headstone as Patrick’s, but the top portion was damaged and removed.
This morning I found her obituary by serendipity. I have been working my way through scans of the baptismal register for Saint Mary’s (a project I will write about soon) and came upon an entry for Stephen Patrick Parker, son of Thomas Parker and Ellen Clinton. It had a date for the baptism, but not for his birth. The baptism was in 1885, and there’s a possible match for this Stephen Parker who was said to have been born in 1888. I decided to do a quick search of the keyword Parker in the Ackley Enterprise on NewspaperArchive.com for the years 1885 to 1888, to see if I could find his birth. I have not found it yet, because I found something else.
That was a brief mention that Julia Parker Kenefick had attended the funeral of her mother. It was third in my results list and was published on 19 Aug 1887 on page 5 column 3.
Mr. and Mrs. M. Kenefick, of Belmond, attended the funeral of Mrs. Kenefick’s mother, Mrs. Parker, last Monday.
It did not come up in the search, but in column 6 on the same page appeared a notice of Mary Parker’s death.
Mrs. Mary Parker died last Saturday morning at the residence of her son Mr. Patrick Parker, in Washington township, Butler county. She was eighty-three years of age and has [for] the last three years been quite feeble. Mrs. Parker was the mother of ten children, nine of whom are living. She was one of the oldest settlers having located at Ackley in 1870. The funeral took place last Monday morning and was lagely attended, Rev. Father Burns officiating. The remains were laid peacefully to rest in the Catholic cemetery.
Mary Parker died 13 August 1887 at the home of her son in Washington township, Butler County, Iowa. She was buried in the church cemetery with Reverend Father Burns officiating. L.H. Burns was the parish priest of Saint Mary’s in Ackley, meaning Mary Parker was buried in their cemetery. And meaning that I have enough evidence that I will consider the Patrick Parker buried there to be my third great grandfather.
Last month I requested a copy of the pension application for my second great grand uncle, Stephen Parker, from the National Archives. I got the first 100 pages on CD today. Much of it I already know. But there are some great pieces of evidence in the file that solidify and confirm important details about Stephen and his family. One item was very new information though, and stood out.
Below is the deposition of Mary Morkin née Parker. She was the daughter of Leonard Parker, who lived near my third great grandfather Patrick Parker in Blanshard township in western Ontario. Leonard and Patrick also have records that put them together in County Westmeath and in Lanark County of Ontario. Other family researchers had written that they were brothers, and I’d tended to go with that assumption as well. Mary Morkin gives the most direct evidence so far that they were in fact related. She testifies that Stephen Parker’s father (Patrick) and her father (Leonard) were first cousins.
Eliminating the possibility they are brothers is going to make looking at any possible records a better process. For instance, I won’t reject families with a Patrick Parker as incorrect matches if there’s no sign of a Leonard in the family. Or if descendants of Leonard Parker take DNA tests, we’ll expect them to be much more distant genetically.
There are more things to glean from this file, but that’s the biggest in the first batch.
The aforementioned Stephen Parker married a Margaret Burk in 1873 in Webster County, Iowa, most likely at the Catholic Church. I’ve also previously noted that their daughters became teachers in the Seattle Public Schools. I’d really like to find out more about his family, so the last week or so I’ve spent looking for records on Maggie.
Margaret and Mary Parker in 1909 Seattle Directory
Ancestry has a good collection of Polks city directories for Seattle, so I looked for her and found her in most of them from 1910 to 1924. Where she was missing, Ancestry was missing pages. One of those was 1909, and Margaret wasn’t to be found in 1908. So I hopped on the bus and went to the Seattle Public Library to look at their collection of directories. Margaret was in 1909. So that puts her arrival in Seattle in 1908 or early 1909. Her daughter Agnes was listed as a teacher at the Ross School in the 1906 directory. As best I can tell, Margaret and Mary arrived together and then the three of them rented an apartment at 1321 E Union where they lived until Margaret’s death in 1924.
1321 E Union Seattle in Sep 2011
The image above is the location in 2011. I haven’t researched the property properly, but the apartment in the background is 1319 E Union and there is no 1321. Either the apartment was renumbered, 1321 was located in the parking lot in the image, or I have the wrong location. The apartment building shown was built in 1909.
I also finally ordered the death certificate for Margaret, which arrived today. Most of it I knew because the folks from the Family History Library indexed a lot of the fields, including the names of her parents. The death certificate did give an exact date of birth for Margaret, if it can be believed. It also has a cause (pneumonia) and exact place (Columbus Sanitarium) of death, which are also new to me. The date of birth may be helpful in finding out who she is.
There are some additional queries I’ve sent, which I haven’t yet received returns for. I wrote to the Archives of the Archdiocese of Seattle seeking information on her funeral, if they have it. They replied via email that I’ll need to query Saint James Cathedral. I sent a letter to Calvary Cemetery, hoping they have some records on her that will reveal something about her. And finally I sent a letter to the Webster County Genealogical Association asking if they’ve got anything on Margaret or her marriage. The Family History Library says it has a book listing marriages compiled by the W.C.G.S., so I figured I would go straight to the source before getting a copy of the book. Hopefully they’ve got Margaret in an index somewhere with a connection to Webster County.
Since I last wrote about Stephen Parker, I’ve learned a bit more about how to do genealogy and have gained some confidence in pursuing leads.
I mentioned it only in passing on this post about my 2nd great grandmother Mary Parker, but that search turned up the baptismal record for her brother Stephen as well. Most of the records about Stephen Parker give only an approximate age for him, and it usually worked out to be around 1837. But the baptismal record for him puts his date of birth as 2 Jun 1835. I’d thought I wouldn’t ever find a real date of birth for him.
Stephen Parker baptismal record
At the Iowa Historical Society a couple of years ago, I couldn’t find any record of his death in the county microfilm holdings. The only things I found were obituaries in their newspaper holdings. The Historical Society also did not have any records from the Hospital for the Insane where Stephen had been committed.
Recently, I wrote to both the Independence Mental Health Institute (M.H.I.) (the successor agency to the Iowa Hospital for the Insane) and to the Buchanan County Genealogical Society looking for how I might find information on Stephen Parker. The fellow who answers email for the genealogical society went above and beyond what I’d hoped, which was contact information at the M.H.I. beyond what I could find on the web site. He looked in the society’s records and after finding nothing, made a trip to the courthouse on my behalf. Unfortunately, he found that no deaths had been recorded at the county from 1889 to 1897, or that those records had been lost. Then he also provided me with instructions on how to request information from M.H.I.
At the same time, I received a response from M.H.I. with the formal version of the same instructions. Having information from the genealogical society on how to navigate the complicated forms was very helpful. I sent those in. M.H.I. didn’t have much information on Stephen Parker, but they did provide the specific date he’d arrived and date and time of death, which turned out to be a day earlier than indicated in his obituaries.
I also requested Stephen Parker’s civil war record from the National Archives. That wasn’t too interesting, but it did provide a physical description for him that came with his oath when he enlisted. He’s described as 5 foot 10 inches, hazel eyes, brown hair and dark complexion on 18 May 1863 when he enlisted.
Stephen Parker – Enlistment Oath
He didn’t last long in the military, being discharged on 6 Aug 1862 at Fort Hamilton New York fir disability, not even three months later. The only information on that comes from the one line notation in the register of enlistments for him.
I’ve also looked for Stephen Parker in the census. He appears with his parents’ family in 1852 in Canada and in 1860 in Wisconsin. In 1870 and 1880, he’s recorded living in Clarion Iowa as a farmer. In 1870 on his own, and in 1880 with a wife and two young daughters. But he was already marked as insane by then, and in fact I believe was not even living with the family despite being recorded there. He’s also recorded on the supplemental schedules for the insane in the 1880 US Census. The records from M.H.I. indicate he’d entered the hospital on 14 Feb 1878. In 1878, there are several entries in the Wright County court docket on a guardianship being established for Stephen’s financial affairs, including this petition from May 1878 saying he’d been committed:
Petition for Appointment of a Guardian – Stephen Parker
The next census where Stephen Parker appears is in the 1895 Iowa census, where he’s still listed living in the hospital. Where I haven’t found him is in the 1885 Iowa census. He doesn’t show up in the indexes for that year, and there are 124 pages for Independence. I haven’t yet had the patience to read through those pages one by one to see if he shows up in some fashion.
In my last post, I wrote about the estimates that Ancestry.com made regarding my ethnicity based on my DNA results. That wasn’t why I took the test though. I wanted to see which family lines I matched. By that, I mean I wanted to find other people who have enough matching genetic markers to indicate that we are related.
Ancestry classified the matches into three categories for me.
3rd cousins, with 98% confidence
While there may be some statistical variation in our prediction, it’s likely to be a third cousin type of relationship—which are separated by seven degrees or seven people. However, the relationship could range from six to ten degrees of separation.
4th cousins, with 95% confidence
For relationships this distant from you, there is greater statistical variation in our prediction. It’s most likely to be a fourth cousin type of relationship (which are separated by ten degrees or ten people), but the relationship could range from six to twelve degrees of separation.
distant cousins, with 50% confidence
As far as DNA goes, you do have a fair amount of shared DNA with this match, however the relationship is distant if it exists at all.
Ancestry found one third cousin match, eight fourth cousin matches, and 101 pages of distant cousin matches. I’ve looked through the online family trees for many of them to see if matching ancestors can be found.
The family tree for the predicted third cousin only goes back to their great grand-parents. To match at 3rd cousins, they’d need to go back to their 2nd great grandparents. However, I’ve done descendancy research on all my 2nd great grandparents, and none of the people in that research match people in her tree. There’s enough holes in my descendancy research from 3rd great grandparents that it’s possible she could fit in there, particularly in the Solle/Hein line, where I haven’t found my 3rd great grandparents yet. I think it’s also important to note that Ancestry gives the confidence at 98%, which means there’s a 2% chance their prediction is wrong.
Of the fourth cousin category, I was able to find common ancestors for four of the eight predicted matches. Three are third cousins, once removed. One is a sixth cousin, once removed.
Of the distant cousin matches, I was able to find three other people with common ancestors. One is a fourth cousin, once removed. One is a 5th cousin. And one is a third cousin, once removed. Third cousins, once removed, are popular in my results.
The Big Tree fan chart with DNA matches marked
The chart above (click to make large) shows the family lines where matching people were found. Three of the third cousins once removed matched Parker/Murphy, Ryan/Sheedy, and Voigt/Thuernich, which are all lines from my paternal grandfather and where I’ve focused a lot of my research energy. One third cousin once removed matched Samms/Cornell, and the remainder matched either at James Washington Annis or his grandfather Ezra Annis. All of these are my maternal grandfather’s family and I’ve barely scratched the research surface in that branch.
The short conclusion I take from that is my research on my paternal grandfather’s family has some genetic support for being correct. There’s still some room for error, but it’s pretty good evidence.
I should also mention there’s one predicted match where I don’t have a common ancestor at this point, but that person’s family tree comes heavily from the area of Piteå, Sweden. That’s where my maternal grandmother’s family is from, so I suspect a match will be found there as well.
And for the benefit of people searching for names on Google, here are the ancestors with matches.
Patrick Parker and Mary Murphy
John Ryan and Deborah Sheedy
Johann Voigt and Mary Agnes Thuernich
Edgar Marion Samms and Ella Orinda Cornell
James Washington Annis and Elizabeth Davis (2 matches)
With the new job, I decided to splurge on a genetic test from Ancestry.com, hoping to see if it matched me up with anyone. As a bonus, they guess what your ethnic ancestry is from the results.
I don’t actually trust those ethic results much, but they still didn’t surprise me to any great degree:
Region
Approximate amount
North Africa
< 1%
Scandinavia
39%
Europe West
24%
Ireland
21%
Europe East
4%
Great Britain
3%
Iberian Peninsula
2%
European Jewish
2%
Finland/Northwest Russia
2%
Italy/Greece
< 1%
Caucasus
< 1%
In map form:
I’m not surprised at all that it predicts my ethnicity is from Scandinavia, Western Europe and Ireland. That’s pretty much what my genealogy says. However, it has a higher percentage of Irish and lower percentage of Western European than my genealogy indicates.
Now, either my genealogy work is wrong, their estimates are imprecise, or the genetic mix of a large portion of my Irish and Western European ancestors is too diverse to accurately classify. Barring an instance of the milkman being my ancestor instead of a documented parent or an unknown adoption, I’m reasonably certain of my tree out to my third great grandparents’ generation. There’s always a possibility of someone schtupping someone they weren’t married to though. I suspect the discrepancy is a combination of items 2 and 3. The 25% of my ancestry that is Swedish can be traced back hundreds of years, and it’s all Swedish. But the Irish, German, and Danish? Well, that could easily be pretty mixed ethnically.
But this analysis isn’t why I took the test. I’ll write about genetically matching people in my family tree in another post. That was far more useful.
