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.

Big Brother updated

"Big Brother" is my main Family Tree set of web pages ("Little sis" being my very first set of webapges, VERY infrequently updated, see Home, for further explanation of what exists were).

If you are used to navigating the menus you will need to break old habits and find where they've shifted to.
SecondSite, the program used to generate these pages direct from my TMG genealogy database, has been updated and allowed me to use Sub Menus.
So all that clutter of surnames etc has been reduced to a much cleaner menu structure.
Everything that used to be there is still there, just shifted in the menu.
For any menu item showing an arrow, either click on the menu item and see an explanation about the offerings beneath it, or hover over the menu item and select a sub menu.
Failing that, why not use the Site Search?

In general, menu items in the sidebar are family specific, although the last three will take you to other sites where copies of my data exists in differently navigable forms.
Those in the top menu are links to other of my webpages.

Canonbie FAIRBAIRNs

Certainly pays to advertise (ie publish trees online).
A potential newfound cousin popped out of the woodwork this week asking about Walter FAIRBAIRN and Grace ARMSTRONG.
She had inherited some family letters and was trying to figure out who was related to whom, knowing only that one or other of them was an uncle or aunt to her great grandparents.
I'm still awaiting a response to my information, but in the meantime have done a bit more digging on the family and pinned down another twig having found what looks like Walter and Grace's granddaughter Grace MURRAY in Manitoba.
Updates will added to the WorldConnect db LornaHenderson once proof found that it's the right Grace.

Connections, Connections!

For publishing genealogy data on my webpages I use SecondSite, which is an extremely flexible, and very well supported add-on to my genealogy software of choice, The Master Genealogist (TMG).

However, I also use The Next Generation (TNG) for some smaller projects, which can be used directly as an online genealogy database,  and thus shared with others interested in the same families - sort of WikiTree but under local control.
It also is very well supported.

Both have dedicated, active,  user communities and I belong to mailing lists for both.
Some of you may be aware that About.com are running an online survey at the moment about the best genealogy software, online trees etc etc.
It is of course extremely selective, unscientific, and ballot box stuffing readily occurs.
Some on the TNG list were wondering what this SecondSite program was that was creeping up the votes.
Comments were a little ill-informed so I piped up and gave a link to a couple of my websites.

Didn't expect what happened next.
A private email turned up from Teresa saying we were 8th cousins!
Her website has a number of families of interest to me, and has allowed me to reduce the number of parentless South West Devon people in my database.  Of particular interest was the 1654 will of Walter NARRAMORE whose children are named as NORTHMORE.
Not that this helped me find my Elizabeth NORTHMORE.
Many of the NORTHOMOREs in my database are descendants of this Walter.

Walter lived at Ideford, but states in his will "I purchased of John Elford of Shister Esquire these Messuages Lands and Tenements called Chubstone otherwise Scotland lyin in Shutstor aforesaid for nynty and nyne yeares".

All of which was completely incidental to our relationship which is back at James BARTER of Lower Dittisham, Teresa descending from his daughter Mary, who married William LIGHT.

With the string of names in her tree from around this area of Devon, our trees probably interconnect many times over.