Finding Another Mooney Brother

Usually, genealogy is a slow, difficult process.  Finding older generations and their missing siblings is almost always difficult.  Every now and then though, the genealogy gods smile on me and thrown me a bone with an easy ancestor.

I had spent hundreds of hours looking for the birth family of my great-great-grandfather, Laurence Mooney (1837-1900) and countless more hours documenting his parents and siblings as well as his Mooney grandparents and some of his aunts and uncles.  I had learned that Laurence’s grandparents were Richard Mooney and Margaret Mooney (yes, that’s also her maiden name), likely born abound 1770 in County Kildare.  Richard passed away before 1832 in Ireland.  I also learned the fate of several of their children:

1)    Lawrence (1799-1871) immigrated to Quebec around the 1820s, married Bridgit Byrne (1800-1885) and started to raise a family of seven children there.  Sometime in the 1850s Lawrence moved the family to Wisconsin.

2)    Michael (1803-1891) immigrated to Quebec in 1821, likely with his older brother, Lawrence.  There, he married Catherine McSweeny (1805-1862) and had two sons.  In 1836 he moved the family to Essex County in Ontario where Catherine gave birth to eight more children. 

3)    Patrick (~1801-1886) started his family in Monasterevan, County Kildare, after marrying Hannah Timmins (1807-1863).  In Monasterevan, Hannaah gave birth to at least 11 children although some died in infancy.    In January 1852, Hannah brough half of the surviving children to Baltimore.  Patrick likely brought the other children close to the same time but in a different voyage for safety concerns.  Patrick in my great-great-great-grandfather.

4)    Mary (1802-1863) never married and I know she came to Baltimore in the 1850s .  It is likely that she emigrated to Baltimore with her brother, Patrick.

5)    John – All that I had previously “learned” about John was that he “first settled in Canada but later joined his older brother in Baltimore” according to a biography written about Michael’s family.   The recent discovery of John’s fate is what prompted this post.

6)    Elizabeth – I am still looking for her.

7)    Bridget – I am still looking for her.

8)    Ellen – I am still looking for her.

So, how did I find out John’s fate and how easy was it?  I can tell you that it took less than five minutes and I was still laying in bed, early in the morning, when I found him.  I should, however, mention that I am only 99% certain that I have this John in the exactly correct spot on my family tree.  I am still looking for concrete proof but I am confident of his position.

As I often do when I wake up, one day last week I had a quick look at any new e-mails, messages and new Ancestry DNA matches.  That day, I had a new match who I will call JGG (to protect his identity).  JGG shared a hefty 24cM of DNA with me but he had no tree in Ancestry.  Normally, I would just skip over such a profile but two things stopped me.  First, I looked at JGG’s shared DNA matches he had with me and there were 20 matches, all on my father’s side.  Six of those 20 were known Mooney descendants who I had already documented.  Those were good signs.  The second reasons I decided to look closer into JGG’s connection was that his name was very unique.  In fact, I Googled his whole name and there was only one person in America that I could find with that name.  The top hit was his mother’s obituary that gave all her details including her father’s name, her mother’s maiden name and her full husband’s name, noting that all pre-deceased her.  After choosing where to start looking (by way of a quick “eeny meeny miny moe”), I searched Ancestry for her father’s name and quickly saw that his mother’s maiden name was Mabel Gertrude Mooney (1862-1941).  That looked like a good start!

Less than two minutes later, I saw that other Ancestry members had identified Mabel’s father as Judson W. Mooney (1835-1864) and her grandfather as John Mooney (1800-1889).  Was that really “my” John though?  It appeared so.  I saw documentation that he had immigrated to Canada first and sometime before 1830, he went to Jefferson County, New York.  I saw his will which identified “Mabel Goodrich [Mabel’s married name] of Cameron, Hall Co., Nebraska, the only child of Judson Mooney, a deceased son of the testator”.   Another source identified John as having been born in County Kildare.  Almost everything fits with what we know about the family.  “Almost” everything.

The only doubt in my mind is from the story about “John emigrating from Canada to join his older brother in Baltimore” has to be wrong.  John had settled his family in Essex County, New York before 1830 and lived there the rest of his life. He likely went to Quebec from Ireland in 1821 with his brothers Lawrence and Michael.  My ancestor, Patrick, only immigrated to Baltimore, direct from Ireland, in 1852 and was the only brother who came directly to the US.  Also, I have never been able to identify any John Mooney born around 1800 in Ireland and living in Baltimore between 1852 and 1890 that looked like he might be Patrick's brother.

With that doubt, why do I think that this John Mooney is placed in the right location in my family tree?  As stated, JGG and I have 20 shared DNA matches on Ancestry.  All 20 are on my father’s side where my Mooney cousins are.  Six of those 20 were known Mooney descendants who I had already documented.  If John Mooney is placed where I think they should be, a son of Richard and Margaret Mooney, that would make JGG my 5^th cousin. As JGG and I share 24cM of DNA, that is a more than typical for a fifth cousin.  Of the 67 5^th cousins I have identified on Ancestry, the range of shared DNA is 6cM – 69cM with the average being 19cM and the mean being 17cM.  By comparison, that same numbers for 4^th to 6^th cousins are:

            Number          Range            Average         Mean

4^th           47               9 – 62cM           23cM           20cM

5^th           67               6 – 69cM           19cM           17cM

6^th           133              6 – 34cM           14cM           13cM

While it is possible that JGG is a sixth cousin, it is much more likely to be a 5^th cousin, or possibly a 4^th cousin.  I have ruled out a 4^th cousin though as I have looked at his entire ancestry (I built a tree for him) and I know 14 of his great-great-grandparents and 24 of his great-great-great grandparents and there is only one Mooney in the lot with no other names matching my father’s ancestors.

I am hoping that more of JGG’s closer cousins get tested on Ancestry which will help prove (or disprove) the relationship but I am not hopeful for that.  Despite John Mooney having nine children, those children and their heirs did not produce any other large families.  It appears that John had only nine grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren.

In another post in the near future, I will give some details of John Mooney’s children and some of the more interesting stories from that branch of the Mooney family.

 

Our Spaghetti Family

My family is not Italian but sometimes our ancestral lines look a lot like a bowl of spaghetti.

Once upon a time, Eliza E. McMillen (1888-1954) was my Granddad Gentry’s fourth cousin in the Timberlake clan.  She married Aldine Joseph Brenneman (1883-1968) on 13 Sep1905 in Auglaize County, Ohio.  Life got complicated after that.

Aldine & Eliza were “blessed” with a dozen children, but the ninth one is the one who caught my eye.  Robert Dean Brenneman (1922-1999) went on to marry six and a half times.  The interesting part is who and how he married.

Wedding #1 was to Erma Jean Colley (1924-2000) on 26 July 1941.  This was a good start to Robert’s marriage career.  At 19 years old, he had a solid job at the local locomotive manufacturer in Lima, Ohio.  Erma was likely still in school at 16 years old but, you know, “young love”.  Well, young love doesn’t always work out.  Within six months Robert had filed for a divorce for “gross neglect of duties” which was granted in February,1942.  Erma must not have been doing her homework.

Wedding #1.5 is complicated.  I threw it in here because maybe there should have been a wedding.  On 1 April 1946, Robert became a father for the first and only time (that I know of).  The mother was Fontella Newland Downey (1927-1990).  Fontella was also from Lima, Ohio and she had been married to Gail C Downey since 1942 but, “for some reason”, they were divorced sometime after the birth of their son in April 1945 and before the birth of his daughter with his second wife in 1947.  Fontella’s maiden name had also looked familiar to me.  I had previously seen that although Robert and Fontella did not get married when they had a child, the event likely brought the two families closer together.  In 1948, Robert’s older brother, Albert Dale Brenneman (1917-1989), married Fontella’s younger sister, Anna Faye Newland (1930-1995).  Albert and Anna had 22-year marriage that produced six children, including one boy named for his Uncle Robert.  I mention that as it might just come up later.

Wedding #2 was to Josephine Mildred Long Curl (1922-2023) on 3 July 1946 in Montana.  I wonder if Montana was where Robert was hiding out, only three months after his daughter was born.  Both Josephine and Robert were living in the small village of Darby before their wedding.  Anyway, Josephine was also originally from Lima, Ohio and she was a war widow.  Her first husband, Harold Curl, had gone missing during WWII and was declared dead in September 1945.  This marriage lasted longer than Robert’s first one.  After no children were produced but by the time of the 1950 census in April of that year, the couple had separated, and the divorce was finalized in October 1950.  They could go on with their own lives.

Wedding #3 was to Josephine Mildred Long Curl Brenneman.  You might recognize that name.  Josephine and Robert apparently didn’t enjoy living separate lives.  They married again on 13 February 1951 in Lima.  I guess they couldn’t wait until St. Valentine’s Day but four months after their divorce was finalized, they were husband and wife again.  Until, at least, January 1952 when they filed for divorce again. 

Wedding #4 was a surprise to me.  Robert was obviously looking to settle down and raise a family.  On 30 April 1955, Robert tried again and married a woman who was raising a nine-year-old daughter from a previous relationship.  If you haven’t figured it out already, his new bride was Fontella Newland Downey, his brother’s sister-in-law and the mother of his child.  I think this is called the circle of life.  Robert, Fontella and their daughter must have been a happy family as this marriage lasted all the way to April 1962 when the next divorce was finalized.

Wedding #5 was not a surprise to me anymore.  Sometime in 1965, Robert married Fontella Newland Downey again.  This marriage lasted another six years until November 1971.  The only surprising part was that it was Robert who filed for divorce, and it was Fontella who was charged with gross neglect and extreme cruelty. 

Wedding #6 can only be addressed if you are sitting down.  Six weeks after Robert’s divorce from Fontella Newland, on 8 January 1972, Robert married Anna Faye Newland Brenneman.  That’s right, his double (triple?) ex-sister-in-law.  Remember, Anna was the sister of his two-time wife, Fontella, as well as the wife of his older brother. Albert.  Anna was fair game since she and Albert had divorced in September 1970 when Albert was charged with gross neglect of duty.  Somehow, someway, Robert finally found his soulmate.  This marriage lasted until Anna’s death in 1995.  It must have made family gatherings a bit awkward for both the Brenneman and Newland families, but it at least gave everyone something to talk about other than politics.

*** As a bonus twist - After Fontella and Robert were divorced the second time, Fontella married Maurice Bernard Fuerst (1932-2018) in May 1973.  Maurice had been married with eight children, but he married Fontella just ten weeks after his divorce to his first wife.  To come back full circle, a little over five years after Fontella died in 1990, Maurice re-married his first wife.  What a hopeless romantic.  Maurice's obituary did not address his 23-year lapse.  That's okay though; you would not believe what Robert Brenneman's obituary glossed over.

Ancestors of Mary E Gallagher French

      This is a temporary post so a relative can see it.  Click on the tree to enlarge it.

Many More Mooneys

My great-great-grandparents were Laurence Mooney (1837-1900) and Julia Quinn 1843-1910).  Uncle Carroll had documented those ancestors many years ago.  I have often visited their graves in my walks around New Cathedral Cemetery in Baltimore.  Despite not giving up completely, I had never really expected to find much about their birth families beyond Julia’s two sisters, Mary & Elizabeth, who had also come with Julia to Baltimore from Monasterevin, Co. Kildare during the Great Famine.  Irish records before 1864 are pretty spotty and often depended on whether or not the particular parish church – if you could identify the correct parish – had a fire, flood, collapse, rodent infestation, etc. during the past two centuries.

As noted though, I never gave up trying to find their birth families and last year, I was over the moon to find not just the names of Laurence Mooney’s parents [Patrick Mooney (~1801-1886) & Hanna Timmins (~1807-1863)] but also those of Laurence’s siblings, the name of their ship that half the family used to emigrate from Ireland, the descendants of two of the siblings as well as what happened to several of the other siblings.  I’m still trying to figure out what happened to the final four siblings.  But I have some bigger news now.

I am once again “over the moon” with another generation of Mooneys and a whole lot of Canadian cousins.

Recently, I was looking at the profile of a DNA match in Ancestry named Jennifer.  Ancestry suggested that I was related to her on my Dad’s side of the family and that she was about a 4^th or 5^th cousin.  Her tree was a bit confusing on her father’s side of the family and there was no documentation or sources but she claimed to be a descendant of a Richard Mooney (1843-1915).  I knew Laurence had a brother named Richard who was supposedly born about 1832 according to the 1860 census but this didn’t match up for other reasons than birth years too.  Jennifer’s ancestor was reported to be born in Sandwich East, Ontario, Canada and my Richard was definitely born in Ireland.

I tried to build the tree for Jenifer from what I could prove starting with her, then her father, then her grandfather.  That got me nowhere. I could not find obituaries for either of the parents she claimed.  What looked to be her step-father did claim her as a daughter though so I figured I had the right mother.  Her paternal grandfather was even more of a mystery – I call people like him ghosts because of their lack of any substantive trail.  With only a name for him as a starting point, I was able to find someone with the same name on two Canadian census records when he was four and 14 years old.  Only today I found his baptism registration which had his whole name (Bernard Benedict O’Connor) and birthday (3 August 1916) as well as his parents’ and god-parents’ names.  That last document sufficiently tied the family together to complete the branch to my satisfaction but earlier – before I found that baptism record – I had giving up on the ground-up approach.

When I started looking at Jennifer’s tree the second time, I tried to document the oldest Mooney’s there, hoping to work my way down to her.  I started with that Richard Mooney, Jennifer’s reported great-great-grandfather.  I was able to document his birth family as well as his wife and all of their children.  Finding information about all the siblings has often provided the most important facts.  That turned out to be very true here.  Richard’s brother, John (1834-1920) was a fairly prominent citizen of Windsor, Ottawa, Canada and his biography ended up in commemorative collection of the town’s who’s who.  That document not only had a wealth of information about John’s family but also a lot about the family of his father, Michael Mooney (1803-1891).  As a bonus, it also had a fair bit of information about the family of his grandfather, Richard Mooney (~1770-?).

(YOU CAN CLICK ON THE PHOTOS TO ENLARGE THEM)

 

That mention of Patrick “who became a citizen of Baltimore in the State of Maryland” was more than I could have hoped for.  Patrick had to be my great-great-great-grandfather.  I traced down the lines of Michael and his brother, Lawrence, who were easy to identify.  I have found four Ancestry DNA matches from Michael’s branch so far and there are several other likely distant cousins on Ancestry who I am still documenting.

Among the other siblings mentioned, there is a Mary Mooney.  I have long suspected that the Mary Mooney “spinster” who died in Baltimore was a sister of my Patrick Mooney.  Mary (1802-1863), was buried in St. Patrick’s Cemetery – the same small cemetery that Patrick was buried in, and moved to New Cathedral Cemetery with Patrick when St. Patrick Cemetery closed.  Mary’s death notice in the newspapers mentioned that she was born in Monasterevin.  Another sibling in the biography that should be findable is John who “first settled in Canada but later joined his older brother in Baltimore”.  So far though, I haven’t figured out which, if any, of the John Mooneys in Baltimore in the last half of the 1800’s is the right one.

Incidentally, finding that biography of the Richard Mooney’s grandson, John, led me another biography in the same book of John’s brother, Richard Clement Mooney (1843-1915).  That also shed more light on the older Mooney family and led to the DNA matches on Ancestry.

I do this genealogy work so that my son and grandsons don’t need to.  I also enjoy entertaining my brothers and sisters with new finds for two minutes before their eyes start to glaze over.  I love using logic and many different techniques to find my relatives, particularly older generations.  Most of all though, I love finding amazing stories about distant cousins.  There is certainly a good story in this branch too.

One of Michael Mooney’s sons was Edward D. Mooney (1845-1907).  Edward was a prominent businessman in the small township of Maidstone, Ottawa before moving to the larger, nearby city of Windsor, just across the border from Detroit.  There he became a city alderman.

Although successful in business and municipal affairs, Edward’s family life was somewhat tragic.  His third child, John Francis (1881-1886), died from the croup when he was only five years old.  Edward’s older two sons, William (1877-1895) and Thomas (1879-1895) were teenagers when they died in front of his eyes when a speeding train crashed into the horse carriage they were all riding in.  Edward’s youngest child, Francis Edward (1892-1924) died in a smallpox epidemic without having ever married.  Edward’s fifth child and only daughter, Marguerite Loretta (1887-1949), did live a long life and raise a family of her own although one of her five children died in the closing weeks of WWII on a bombing mission over Hamburg.

It was Edward’s fourth son that had the burden on his shoulders of carrying on the family name though and he succeeded in every way possible.  Bernard Richard Mooney (1885-1973) was severely wounded during WWI in Belgium while working as a medical officer.  He was later a pioneer radiologist in Canada.  Bernard did his post graduate work in Paris, Stockholm and London, studying the effects of radium on cancer diseases.  He set up the radiology departments in several hospitals and universities.  In true Irish fashion, Bernard and his wife, Elizabeth, managed to raise a family of seven daughters, four sons as well as two more adopted daughters.  By the way, the family was still so Irish that three of the daughters became cloistered nuns.

One of Bernard and Elizabeth’s daughters, Laura (1919-2002), obviously enjoyed being part of a large family.  Laura and her husband, Robert Lee O’Brien, aimed higher but sadly, Robert died just a few months after their tenth child was born, a few days short of their 18^th anniversary.  With sheer determination, Laura moved the family from New York across the continent to Vancouver where some family could help.  She was a powerful single mom but not for a long time.  Seven years slater, she married Larry Gingras, a widower… with twelve children of his own.  God loves the Irish!

Finally, I should mention that I am still tracking down other DNA relatives in these Mooney branches.  The more I find, hopefully in different branches of the Canadian Mooneys, the more I am sure of the connection.  Also, at the top of the tree, sits Richard Mooney and Margaret Ellen Begg who lived and died in County Kildare near the parish of Monasterevin.  I had seen a few Ancestry members say that Lawrence, Patrick Michael and Mary's parents were "Richard and Ellen Mooney" but there was never any evidence provided and I could not find any previously.  Ellen's maiden name was never mentioned.  The biographies above say that Margaret Mooney was Richard's wife's maiden name.  I don't believe that last name at all. From what I have now seen, some old Irish sources refer to the matriarch Ellen and others as Margaret.  Some use the surname Begg and some say Mooney.  There is no pattern to suggest they are two different women but I have to find more definitive proof one way or the other.  To be continued...

The Herne / O’Herne / Ahern Family Mystery

My great-great-great-grandfather, Martin Gentry Jr. (1789-1827) married Delphia Herne (1791-?) on 12 January 1807 in Garrard County, Kentucky.  Both Martin & Delphia were reported to be from Albemarle County, Virginia.  Martin had moved with his birth family to Madison County, Kentucky (adjacent to Garrard County) in the first decade of the 1800’s, originally to Fort Boonesborough.  Delphia’s family would likely have come to Kentucky about the same time.  According to the book, “The Gentry family in America, 1676 to 1909”, after having at least six children, Martin and Delphia separated and Martin was reported to have two more sons with a second wife in Indiana while Delphia supposedly took her underage children to Pike County, Missouri.

I have been looking for Delphia’s birth family for a long time.  The only clue I had was her marriage registration.  Despite the spelling, it gives the following information: “Martin Jentry was married to Delphy Hern on 12 January 1807 by Peter Bainbridge with the marriage bond provided by John Hern and, because the bride was underage at the time, consent of the father, Owen Hern, was obtained”.

That much of the story has long been known to the family and is pretty well documented on Ancestry.  I could find no documentation or information about Owen or the rest of his family. 

This past month I thought I had broken though that wall but it’s more like a gentle knocking on the door that is slowly getting louder.

While looking in Ancestry at my closest DNA matches who I had not yet identifed, I saw a few that were related to each other with a common ancestors coming from Warren and Edmonson counties, Kentucky.  As I always do with such groupings, I tried to find their common ancestors which, theoretically, should point towards my common ancestor with them.

Here is when I got excited.  I could trace the whole group to the common ancestors, William Thomas Grubbs (1720-1776) and his wife, Susanna Herne (1729-1817).  Thomas and Susanna were married in Albemarle County, Virginia around 1743 and moved with their ten children to Kentucky about 1775.  They managed to reach Bryan’s Station, near modern day Lexington, around 1776 but Thomas soon passed away.  Susanna then took her children southward to Madison County.  It wasn’t long before I found old books on Ancestry that mentioned Susanna’s parents… Owen and Catherine Herne.

That is when I shrieked.  I reckoned that I had found Dephia’s sister and mother.  I happily started documenting the first several generations of Grubbs as well as the lines down to my Ancestry DNA matches.  This expansion of the tree led to other likely descendants of the Grubbs that have had their DNA tested on Ancestry.  I was starting to get overwhelmed by the numbers of people when I finally saw the obvious elephant in the room.  Susanna was born in 1729.  Delphia was born in 1791.  The chance of them being sisters is zero.  Assuming Owen was at least 18 years older than Susanna, he would have been 96 years old when he granted Delphia permission to get married.  That’s even less likely than him fathering her when he was 80 years old.

It’s back to the drawing board with the Herne family.  I can’t, however, deny the DNA matches, nor the geographic connections and similar names.  I’m certain that I'm related to the Grubbs but I don’t know exactly how.  At the moment, I am going with the theory that when Susanna moved to Kentucky with her husband and children, the living members of her birth family stayed in Virginia.  I have seen one completely undocumented tree on the internet that Susanna had siblings named William, Mary and Owen Jr.  This second brother, Owen Jr., who was reportedly born in 1726, could possibly be Delphia’s father.  If that is the case, I have a lot of 6^th cousins who I share 24-29cM of DNA with which is actually more than I share with the 4^th cousins in the Martin Gentry & Delphia Herne branch. Perhaps Owen Jr. was the grandfather instead of the father of my Delphia.  I don’t know.  I'm still looking.

As of today, I have traced, documented and confirmed ten Ancestry DNA matches of mine who are descendants of Susanna Herne Grubbs through four different children of hers.  There are several more matches that I am still working on.  I have also found a transcription of the 1750 will of Catherine Steward (Owen Herne Sr.’s wife) who mentions her children as: Owen Ahern, William Ahern, Susanna Grubbs, Ann Pierson and Mary Hix.  She also mentioned her son-in-law Thomas Grubbs.

More Schmitts and More Generatioins

Proving family connections from 200 years ago isn't always easy with just documents.  Census, birth, death, marriage records and newspaper articles may not be available any longer and family letters were passed on to other descendants or thrown away a long time ago.  Sometimes DNA evidence is all I am able to use.  I guess if it is good enough to convict people of crimes and to identify the remains of distant relatives, it will have to do for me. 

My great-great-grandfather was definitely Joseph Schmitt (b. 8 Mar 1838, Bavaria – d. 25 Nov 1915, Baltimore, Md.).  I recently found six DNA relatives on Ancestry who all descend from three different children of George Schmitt (b. 19 Jul 1844, Baunach, Bavaria – d. 7 Nov. 1900, Baltimore, Md.) and his wife Eugenia Mary Sorg.  The six DNA relatives all share between 17 and 27cM with me.  This much DNA suggests that the Ancestry members are almost certainly my 4^th cousins or 4^th cousins once removed.  If true, that would mean that George and Joseph were brothers – but this is still just assumed as I have no documentation for it.  The only supporting information is that they were both from Bavaria, both were Catholic rather than Lutheran and both reported on the 1900 census that they immigrated in the early 1850’s.  There is also some evidence that they both arrived and settled in New York at first before coming down to Baltimore just before and after the Civil War.

That is enough evidence for me to justify including George & his descendants on my tree in Ancestry but I really would love to find documents to back that up.

If George and Joseph really were brothers, then it was likely that Joseph was also born in Baunach.  Another reasonable assumption is that George and Joseph likely emigrated together, with their parents and any other siblings.  George would have been less than eleven years old when he came to America, too young to emigrate alone or with another minor brother.  Both of these educated guesses are useful to me.

Two other DNA relatives that I have in Ancestry can trace their ancestors to different children of Franz Otto Schmitt (b. 6 Sep 1841, Bamberg, Bavaria – d. 17 Jul 1877, Louisville, Ky.).  Bamberg is the nearest city to the small village of Baunach, only about 12km (7 miles) away.  Franz was documented to be the son of Johann Oswald Schmitt (b. 16 Sep 1818, Baunach, Bavaria – d. 22 Dec 1893 Louisville, Ky.).  At first, I hoped that Franz and Johann were the brother and father, respectively, of the brothers in my tree, Joseph and George.  This does not look to be correct though. 

Johann, Franz and Franz’s wife and children only emigrated in 1882 and, although they landed in Baltimore, they quickly pressed on to Louisville, Ky. Also, Johann is also reported to have had a son named George who was born only a month before the George in my tree was born.  Johann’s George is also reported to have died in infancy in 1845.

I am now working on the educated guess that Johann was the uncle of my great-great-grandfather, Joseph Schmitt as well as the assumed brother of Joseph, George.  The two DNA relatives who descended from Johann and Franz share 17 and 8cM with me.  I believe that they are 5^th cousins and 4^th cousins once removed, respectively.

Even though I don’t have definitive proof of the relationship of all these Schmitts from Baunach, The DNA points to this conclusion.  I am putting them in my tree to help me find further DNA relatives who descended from Johann.

Maybe, just maybe, there is a new Gisriel in the family

Since childhood, I always heard that two Gisriel brothers, Jacob and Frederick, came to America from the German speaking area Alsace, France and started the two branches of the family.  

We have since learned that Jacob and Frederick had an older sister named Magdalen with them in Baltimore.  She started a third branch of the family.  Their mother, Sophia, was also in Baltimore, at least at the time of the 1850 census.  It looks likely that she brought the children to America in the early 1830s and there is some evidence that their father, Georg, was with them too.  There is a Georg buried in the Jacob Gisriel family plot in Baltimore’s New Cathedral Cemetery but he was a reburial from another cemetery.  There is no other information to identify when Georg died or what the relationship is. He doesn’t appear to be a child of Jacob though.

Uncle Carroll, the genealogist for our branch of the family, was the one that told me that Gisriel wasn’t the real family name.  The name they were born with – Gießenregen – was a little too hard on the ears of Americans.  In the decades after they arrived, most of the family changed the name to Gisriel. 

It wasn’t quite that simple though.  The families obviously tried out other options, such as Giesrehn, but the misspellings of the various names were too numerous to count.  A few that I have seen include Geisenrick, Griswold, Gissell, Grieviel, Gilirel, Gieswell, Giserile, etc.

All this “what’s our name?” leads to the current find.  I have been able to identify and tie together almost all of the Gisriel descendants who have had their DNA tested on Ancestry.  There is one small cluster though that I could not figure out.  A woman from Hagerstown, “Bonnie” who died in 2020 was tested on Ancestry and we share 23cM of DNA which points her to be about a 3rd or 4th cousin of mine. All of our shared DNA relatives were descendants of Georg and Sophia Gießenregen so I was pretty sure that this woman was a descendant or theirs too.  Two of her grandchildren are also DNA matches to me but that makes obvious sense.  I thought I had pretty well figured out most of the descendants of Jacob, Frederick and Magdalen so I tried to match my information to the family trees that was put together for Bonnie and her relatives.

If Bonnie was my 3rd cousin, we would share a pair of great-great-grandparents.  If she was a 4th cousin, one of each of our great-great-grandparents would be siblings and share a last birth-name.  That’s why I started looking at Bonnie’s 16 great-great-grandparents.  All of them were born between 1797 and 1844 with the mean year of birth being 1817.  Since Magdalen was born in 1820, Frederick about 1826, and Jacob in 1827, I fully expected to see one of them among Bonnie’s 16 great-great-grandparents.  Just to be sure, I double checked the parents of the only one of the 16 who was born after 1835 and she wasn’t the child of one of the three siblings either.

It’s possible that Bonnie and I are 5th or 6th cousins but that is less than a 10% chance.  I looked closer at the group of 16.  Could one of them be a sibling of Magdalen, Frederick and Jacob?  I only had a little bit of work to do but one of the 16 looked like it had the best chance of being in our family.  In Baltimore, on 27 June 1850, a 23 year-old Alfred Borgealt married an 18 year-old Catherine M Crishrile.  Actually, one marriage record had the name spelled as Crishrile and another had it as Krisrile.  Is this another misspelling of Gisriel or one of the attempted Anglicizations of the name?  Could Catherine be a younger sister to Magdalen, Frederick and Jacob?

The problems I have with this theory are that census records show that Catherine reported to having been born in New York State.  Wouldn’t she be born in Alsace like the three Gisriel siblings?  In the 1880 census, she said her father was born in France and her mother in Prussia.  Those locations might actually be expected but by the 1900 and 1910 censuses, Catherine was quite old and in the care of a daughter.  The daughter reported that Catherine was born in New York but Catherine’s parents were from Maryland.  That would be odd if true but unexplainable other than the daughter didn’t know or didn’t care what she reported.

How is it possible that Catherine could be a Gisriel born in New York?  We have never found the immigrant ship that the family came to America on.  Jacob’s death certificate says that he was a resident of Baltimore since about 1834.  Magdalen’s said she was a Baltimore resident since about 1833. I had assumed that was when the family emigrated.  Was it possible that the Gisriel family came to New York first, around 1830, added Catherine there in 1831 and then moved to Baltimore in 1833 or 1834?  That would change where I looked for a port of arrival and a possible death location of Georg.  It would also show that George likely made it to America.

So, what is next?  How do I prove or disprove this theory?  Here is what I have to do next.  I still haven’t figured out Catherine’s date of death.  It turns out that Borgealt has as many spelling variations as Gisriel.  Once I find that, I should be able to find a death certificate which should show her parents’ names.  That would be the best proof.  It’s also possible that there is a birth or baptism record for Catherine in New York.  It’s unlikely but possible to include her parents’ names.  Alfred and Catherine also had five children.  The death certificate of their son mentions “unknown” for the names of his parents but by the time he died, he was in Spring Grove Sanitorium.  I know the death certificate numbers for two of their daughters but I’ll have to check their death certificates when I next visit Maryland and the state archives.  Hopefully I find a mother’s maiden name there that looks more like Gießenregen or Gisriel.  I have not been able yet to find out who the other two daughters married or when they died but I will soon have access to a database to help me find that information and improve my chances of finding their mother’s maiden name.

In summary….. there is more work to be done.  … to be continued.

Update #1 - I found Catherine's death certificate.  Her son-in-law who helped care for her in his house in her old age was the informant on the certificate.  He reported that Catherine was born in New York and both her parents were from Germany but, alas, he did not know Catherine's parents' names.  The German ancestry supports the theory that Catherine was a Gisriel but the lack of names doesn't help either way.  

Update #2 - With the help of Bonnie's daughter, I determined that I was a DNA match to a second cousin of hers who is a grandson of Bonnie's father's sister.  That means that I only have to be looking at Bonnie's father side of the family and half of Bonnie's 16 great-great-grandparents.  Catherine is still in the correct half to support the theory.

Update #3 - On my visit to the Maryland State Archives in June, I was able to find the death certificates of Mary Virginia Borgealt Mentzel and Emma C Borgealt Hill.  Both certificates clearly name their mother as Catherine Gisriel.  That's concrete documentation to back up the DNA evidence.  Catherine was a younger, American-born sister to Magdalen, Frederick and Jacob.