Things That Have Happened in the Last Year

I didn't realize it had been nearly a year since my last post.  Between then and now I've met my paternal half-brother Hans and his wife and young son.  I rejoined Facebook after a 2+ year hiatus, reconnecting me with my paternal half-sister Simone, the paternal first cousin once removed who orchestrated the Von Trapp family reunion, and my various maternal relations who I only ever communicate with on there.  Apparently no one was avoiding me; they just don't bother replying to emails.

No new half-siblings, leaving the donor conceived sibling count at zero.  No new word from my adoptive brother Dante or any other family.  I haven't heard from Dante since 2017 after I wired him our dad's life insurance payout.  I thought he might've friended our cousins on Facebook since he'd said when Dad died that he wanted to get back in touch with them, but the only thing I can see that he he has done on Facebook since then is join a group from our hometown, get into some internet fights with locals, get banned from the group, and then post that he has no idea why he was banned and they're all just too cliquey.  Now that's the Dante I remember.

No new word from my biological father.  No direct communication since he asked me not to contact him again after receiving my letter in 2014.

I can't remember if I wrote about discovering on Newspapers.com that my dad's father had another family and a well documented criminal record (thank you, Fresno Bee) before he moved back to the Midwest and married Grandma.  And thus my dad had a secret half-brother he may or may not have known about.  I emailed Dante about it but got no response.  The half-brother died a few years before my dad did and had no known biological children.  He had been named after my grandpa, but his stepfather had adopted him when he was little and given him a new surname.  I'd like to ask my dad's brother and sister if they knew about the secret half-brother, but I haven't seen my uncle since Dad's funeral or my aunt since my wedding over a decade ago.  I could probably count on my hands the number of times I've talked to them in my life, so reaching out for this would be more awkward than I'm willing to do.

My mom's suspected half-sister's daughter took a DNA test, confirming my grandpa was, in fact, her grandfather too.  I thought I'd written about my mom's secret half-sister/cousin, but I can't find it anywhere but here.  My cousin Michelle and I had started to doubt the veracity of the claim that Grandpa had fathered Ruby shortly before Ruby's mother had married his half-brother.  It was the big family "secret" all the cousins knew.  Ruby's daughter showed up as a first cousin match for me on 23andMe though, which is way too close a match for us to be half-second cousins (we share more than triple the DNA I share with my known half-second cousins on AncestryDNA -- the ones who should be her first cousins but aren't), so I know for sure now that we're actually half-first cousins.  We chatted on 23andMe a bit.  She asked after my (our) remaining uncle, Eugene, who neither of us has heard from in years.  I assume she knows as well as any of us who her grandfather is, but since I'd never talked to her or her mother (my half-aunt) before in my life and I don't know how their branch of the family feels about any of this, we never got onto the topic of biological grandfathers.  I wish I knew a polite and inoffensive way to say, "I've seen some wonky shit on here and I'm comfortable talking about anything you want to talk about.  You won't upend my world; I just don't want to upend yours either."

Update on the NPE in my Family Tree

I previously wrote about the wonkiness in my family tree.  It's looking more and more like my gg-grandfather was not, in fact, my biological gg-grandfather.  I currently have 26 DNA matches I can trace back to the same married couple in the Willis family.  Ancestry isn't aware of most of them because I drew up their trees myself.  I've made at least thirty of what I think people call "mirror trees."  My closest matches in this Willis family group share just over 100 cM of DNA with me.  Based on other cousins with whom I share the same amount of DNA as well as the extensive Willis family tree I've mocked up, I think the eldest match is my second cousin twice removed and the other two are my third cousins once removed.  This is all still estimation.

I've also discovered, as more close matches appeared, that there are genetic links between this massive group of Willis family members and Aida and my closest mystery cousin, the one who self-identifies as Cherokee but turned out to be 100% white lady.  All my mystery people are turning out to reside on the same mysterious branch of my family tree.  I guess this shouldn't surprise me since I have so many matches across most of the rest of my tree that I can often tell how I'm related to someone based solely on shared DNA matches.  (I have a LOT of matches.  I credit it to being so historically American and the DNA testing companies also being American.)

There is so much data it's hard to compile into one place where I can see it at a glance.  Today I started to draw the family tree on a wall-sized dry erase surface in the hopes of fitting all the DNA matches I know and then trying out places where my mystery cousins might fit.  It makes me look like a conspiracy theorist, or so I like to think.  I just need some red string and photographs.

I currently have one most likely suspect for the role of gg-grandfather based on proximity of DNA matches, though he isn't necessarily it.  My next step will be to figure out some currently living descendants who might someday DNA test and to hypothesize what their matches to other cousins should look like.  I think the match I'd most like to see would be one of my g-grandmother's descendants, any of whom should match to my entire mystery bunch as well as to the descendants of my gg-grandmother's clan in Illinois.

Something to consider for anyone who thinks they can keep a child's paternity a secret if they just wait out the clock:  the person I'm in the process of finding out isn't biologically my ancestor is 150 years my senior.  He died decades before my parents were born.  He fought in the Civil War.  

DNA testing is still in its infancy.  Who knows what DNA tests will be able to unearth in another 150 years.

If anyone has done genetic genealogy focusing on people this far removed from the current era and has advice or suggestions for what I should be doing next, please let me know.  It's hard since the margin of error increases -- snowballs, really -- each time you go back another generation.

There's Something Wonky in My Family Tree

Warning:  This is long and might be completely uninteresting.  It's also hard to make it make sense without visual aids, so it might be nonsensical.

tl;dr:  I think my great-great-grandfather was either adopted or someone else altogether.

New Match
I got a new match on 23andMe not too long ago -- a 2nd to 4th cousin, the site said.  Since the user name said TJCapello*, it became my closest actionable (i.e., non-anonymous and as yet unsolved) match on the site.  I sent him the default "let's share DNA info and see how we're related" message, but -- as expected -- I didn't get an immediate response.  His profile was new and contained no additional information.

I looked up the initials and refreshingly uncommon surname and, taking into account that he was male, I found his full name and location online with a quick Google search.  I started drawing up a family tree for him based predominantly on his mother's obituary on Legacy.com (but also using pipl.com, Facebook, FamilySearch, and Ancestry), and I was delighted to learn three out of the four of his grandparents were Italian immigrants.  I have only trace amounts of Southern European DNA myself and a tree filled with British and German names, so I focused my tree-building efforts on the non-Italian quarter of his ancestry. 

Then I got another new DNA match, even closer this time -- a 2nd to 3rd cousin, it said.  I quickly learned it was my previous match's sister (different surname, but Google knows all).  Whatever my relationship to her is, it's the same one I share with him, so I figured I should be able to find our most recent common ancestors in the great-great-great-grandparent range or even closer (thank you, ISOGG).

I built out the English-sounding quarter of the Capellos' family tree until it should have intersected with my own.  It even featured the surname Willis* like my own tree, and they lived in the Midwest, not far from another branch of my own family tree.  But I couldn't find any overlap, despite my own Willis branch of the family tree tracing back to the 1600s. 

I put this project aside for awhile, and I come back to it every so often.  This wouldn't be an easy one to solve like I had thought.  Either their family tree contains an error -- perhaps from an adoption or a non-paternity event -- or mine does.  Or maybe that mysterious branch of my family tree that ought to lead back to New York where my great-great-grandfather was born really doesn't.   

The Wonkiness
Recently I've started finding other DNA matches, on Ancestry this time -- all in Ancestry's "4th to 6th cousins" range, which tends to be a very loose estimate -- whose trees overlap with that same Willis branch that doesn't fit into my own.  I've found upwards of five matches whose trees overlap in the same place, making them all second and third cousins of the Capellos, though Ancestry hasn't put it together into a "hint" for me yet because I sometimes have to draw up the family trees myself based on less detailed trees or user names alone.  I appear to share about half as much DNA with those Ancestry matches as I do with the Capellos, which leads me to believe my family tree intersects with the Capellos' a generation more recently than it intersects with the others'.  But that leaves me confused.  Looking at their family tree, that means I'm descended from a Willis born in the early to mid-1800s.  I already have all those slots in my family tree filled.  I don't know how they could fit into my own tree.

That said, I don't believe any ancestor on my family tree is necessarily the right one until I have at least a couple separate (non-sibling) matches whose combined DNA and family trees support my data.  The more distant the ancestor, the less possible s/he is to confirm.  The more distant the cousin, the less possible s/he is to confirm.  I'm in contact now with some cousins so distant that the relationship doesn't even show up in our DNA anymore, and I only feel confident of the relationship because of overlapping family trees and mutual DNA matches within those same family trees. 

Logicking It Out
Here's the deal with the Willis branch of the tree in question:  It shows up in several reasonably close DNA matches' trees, so I assume it is how I'm related to them.  It's possible I'm wrong, but it's unlikely.  In order to fit it into my own tree however, something currently in my tree must be wrong.  First, I know the Willises are connected to my maternal side because my paternal uncle on Ancestry shares zero of those matches with me.  I also have enough known DNA matches at this point to draw the conclusion that several specific ancestors on my tree must be accurate.  I can verify my mother is my mother, I can verify her parents are my grandparents, and I can verify my great-grandparents too.  I have enough reasonably close DNA matches backing up my data that I feel confident about six of my eight maternal great-great-grandparents.  I even have an Ancestry "hint" that aligns another more distant cousin with ancestors of one of the two remaining great-great-grandparents (I feel less certain because it's only one match and a distant one at that).  That would leave Jack, my great-great-grandfather who supposedly came from New York. 

Jack is the brick wall of the mystery branch of my family tree.  I have no DNA matches to support him, and many hours of research have yielded no indication of who his parents were, which makes it exceptionally hard to find DNA matches that would support him.  His wife, my great-great-grandmother Emily, was from rural Illinois, within a 45-minute drive of the Willises.  According to census records, she was twenty years younger than Jack and had their first child -- my great-grandmother -- when she was 28.  They'd supposedly married two years earlier, but I have not been able to find a marriage record, though I found one for her first marriage easily enough.  Lots of my ancestors crossed state lines to marry though, so I'm not even sure where to focus my search.  Could Jack have been my great-great-grandfather but actually been adopted?  I would think this more likely if he didn't claim to have grown up in New York, over a thousand miles from the family to which I'm trying to connect him.  I could be wrong, but I don't think adoptees were moved that far from their birth families in the 1850s.  Could my great-grandmother have been a non-paternity event (NPE), meaning Emily was impregnated by someone who wasn't Jack?  If that is the case, I'm still not sure who my great-great-grandfather would be.  There isn't one specific "most likely suspect" in the Willis family tree, either based on DNA or based on relative age and geographic proximity.

Next Steps
My closest DNA match on Ancestry whose tree contains the Willis line has several matches in common with me.  A few of them also contain the Willis line, but several don't have detailed trees, nor are they related to the entire cluster of other Willis descendants, though they are related to each other.  My next step is to build family trees for the ones who don't have them yet, or whose trees only have a couple of names, which is most of them.  My hypothesis is that the ones who aren't mutual DNA matches with the Willis cousins will be related via an adjacent family line -- perhaps the Thompsons.  Thompson was the maiden name of my closest Willis cousin's great-grandmother.  If I'm right and they're connected via an adjacent family line, it would tell me which generation connects me to that family tree -- the generation containing both the Willises and the Thompsons (or whichever adjacent family surname) rather than an earlier generation.

In case you're wondering why I would put so much effort into something that matters so little, please understand THIS IS MY FAVORITE KIND OF PUZZLE.  I have been waiting for something like this to happen ever since I solved the "who is my biological father?" puzzle, which was at most a 4-star difficulty on Dell Logic Puzzles' 5-star scale.  I find few things as gratifying as solving logic-based puzzles, and solving this one will create an even bigger hint toward solving other genealogical puzzles, of which there are two more I've been working on for months.  I've written about Aida, but there is another one I haven't even mentioned yet (she self-identifies as Cherokee, but her DNA is 99% European), and the solution to this Willis puzzle will help me towards solving both of them via deductive reasoning.  In short, I'm doing this for fun.

*Not his actual name.