Meet the (Great-Great-Great Grand)Parents
On the people and things we've discovered through genealogy sites. An open thread...
Readers,
I’m not sure what persuaded me to sign up for Ancestry around this time in 2015, then to spit in a vial and mail it off for DNA analysis. Nothing in my family history as I knew it suggested there would be any surprises. But there were some.
Let me lower your expectations here and tell you my surprises pale next to the major family bombshells others have unearthed through genealogy sites—different parentage than they knew; having been swapped with other babies at birth; siblings and other relatives they were never meant to find out about.
Me? Ten years after moving to the Kingston, N.Y. area, I discovered that my ancestors had lived there from the 1860s to the 1920s—after escaping religious persecution and pogroms in eastern Europe, and before relocating to the Bronx—and that many of them are buried a mile from my house, in beautiful Wiltwyck Rural Cemetery, where I’d already been taking walks for years.
That, and the Sephardic part of my family is also Italian. A whopping 28% of my DNA comes from there. I’d always assumed I was 100% Jewish, ethnically, but that percentage, according to Ancestry DNA, is just 68%.
How about you? Did you find out anything about yourself and your heritage through a genealogy site that you didn’t already know?
Growing up, I knew only that my late grandmother, Clarisse Kemp Masket, had spent summers as a young child “usptate.” In a box teeming with old family photos, there were some of her in “the country.”
But then I got on Ancestry, and learned for certain that those photos were taken in Kingston. I arrived at that after going down a series of rabbit holes on the site, led by a distant cousin. My mother had connected me with him—someone she’d never even met, but who’d emailed her once, after he started searching his family on the site. That distant unknown cousin connected me to another one, who sent me many key links—plus a map of Wiltwyck Cemetery indicating where our relatives were buried.
I became obsessed. There were many spooky details. For instance, the day I got on Ancestry, I was sitting in the basement of 45 North Front Street, where my husband’s computer repair shop and my writing space were located, and I was reading about A. Cohen & Corn, my family’s business that was partially located next door, at 47 North Front. I put my hand on the basement wall adjacent to that property and let it sink in. Whoa.
Spookier: Brian and I headed to Wiltwyck with the faded map we got from my distant cousin and walked in circles, struggling to locate my ancestors. Then—as Brian is my witness—a tree branch made a large cracking sound and fell to the ground a foot from the headstone shared by my great-great-great grandparents, Isidor Corn, and Hannah Aaron Corn. Literal shivers.
I’d never even heard of these people—probably in part because my grandmother, Clarisse, died at 55 in 1972, when I was 6-and-a-1/2—but we shared DNA and I was now standing on top of ground they’d been buried under for 129 and 127 years, respectively. My mother hadn’t heard of them, but she grew up knowing their daughter, Bertha, aka Betty Corn Kemp—my mother’s great grandmother, my great-great. In fact, I’ve long had in my possession a photo of Betty as a girl. I turned it over to discover it was taken at a studio on Wall Street in Kingston…while Brian and I were living in an apartment on Wall Street. Wild!
I’ve only scratched the genealogical surface on this part of my family, and I have many other branches of the tree to investigate. I haven’t had the time to go much deeper in my research; hopefully I will before too long.
Last weekend I was at a B’Nai Mitzvah in the Bay Area with my maternal grandfather’s family, and after hearing the elders tell family stories—from the Leitna Podolia shtetl in Ukraine, to the Bronx, to Long Beach, N.Y.—I want learn more about the Maskets, and also about my father’s family, the Bottons (many of whom still go by the original name, DeBotton), who immigrated here from Greece and Turkey.
But for now, it’s been fun to learn I have more of a connection to Kingston and its environs—where I’ve been living for 18 years—than I already knew.
Now I want to hear about the wild things you’ve discovered on genealogy sites, about yourself, your family, your ethnic background. Tell me in the comments…
-Sari
Hi Sari! I enjoyed your post. My story: two years after writing a CNF piece about my great-aunt Czarna, who was murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz, and her son Joseph, who survived as a hidden child in France, I was contacted by a woman in Corsica doing research on her grandmother who was “abandoned at birth” (her words). I was skeptical at first, but after exchanging many documents and doing a DNA test, it turns out Czarna had a baby out of wedlock that no one in the family knew about and we have an entire branch of the family in France/Corsica. I went to meet one of my cousins earlier this year!
Here’s my original essay: https://jwa.org/blog/czarna
And here’s the one I wrote after we learned the news: https://jwa.org/blog/czarna-reimagined
I made a visit to see my baby sister and the two of us found the grave of our maternal great grandmother Martha Sixkiller, in Bunch Cemetery in the midst of the Cookson Hills of the Cherokee Nation. I come from those who colonized this land and from those who had lived here for centuries when the colonizers arrived. I’d always known this but somehow being in eastern Oklahoma once called the Indian Territory where my ancestors were marched to from their homelands brought it all home to me, a driven girl, who grew up on the road. Epigenetic insight is powerful.