Category Archives: Genealogy/family

Remembering Bonnie’s birthday

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If things had been different, my older sister, Bonnie Stevens, would have been celebrating her 77th birthday today. Instead, she passed away in October 2016 of breast cancer.

In one of those weird coincidences, I just ran into a little video taken when we celebrated her birthday in April 2009 with dinner at our parents’ house in Kahala. It was just Bonnie, our mother (who turned 95 the following month), Meda and me. Our father wasn’t there for the party. He had been in a nursing home since the previous November, after a fall sent him to Queen’s Hospital. We celebrated on April 9, the day before Bonnie’s actual birthday, because Meda and I were both working in town that day.

I say finding the video was a weird coincidence because I just happened to notice it while briefly scanning a small hard drive containing photo files from 2009 to determine how to back up the data. Its tiny thumbnail looked like a fire or volcano, so I clicked and opened it. The “volcano” turned out to be the candles burning on Bonnie’s birthday cake in the first seconds of the video. I have no recollection of the video, so finding it on April 9, the day before Bonnie’s birthday, and the same date that we had that dinner in 2009, rings of synchronicity.

It’s interesting to see my parents house, which is now our house. That light over the dining table was broken, and needed a tap or two in order to turn on. The house itself has been extensively renovated, but the spaces are still much the same.

So, Bonnie, we’ll remember you and have a drink in honor of your birthday this evening. Thanks for reminding me.

Tracking evidence of my great-grandmother’s death in 1907

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In my post here yesterday, I was trying to sort out the truth of the death of my great-grandmother, Helene Brittain Yonge, my mother’s paternal grandmother. Did she commit suicide, as one San Francisco newspaper reported at the time, or did she die during the plague outbreak that followed the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, as I’ve always believed based on the story passed down within our family?

By the end of the day, I had an answer.

And the score was:


Document research….. 1
Fake News………….. 0

The suicide allegation had been in an article published by the San Francisco Call newspaper on July 29, 1908, describing an incident in which which Helene’s daughter, Ellen, attempt suicide by taking poison while riding a public street car in the city. She was saved by quick action of bystanders, who rushed her to a nearby hospital.

According to the newspaper’s account:

After she regained consciousness the girl said that she had been led to attempt to end her life by worry over the recent suicide of her mother and at the charges which were brought by her father and sister against her policeman sweetheart. Though they were dismissed before Davey was brought to trial, they preyed on her mind, and last night she left her home at 2415 Howard street, where she had been giving lessons in music and art, with the full intention of killing herself.

Although other newspapers also followed the girl’s story, this was the only reference I could find to my great-grandmother having committed suicide.

After writing yesterday’s post, I contact two cousins, daughters of my mom’s sister. Neither recalled their mother ever talking about her grandmother, so that was a dead end.

And I wasted a lot of time in an unsuccessful attempt to identify descendants of Helene’s son (and my grandfather’s brother) Arthur David Yonge, who might have also heard family versions of the events.

Then I stumbled onto a document possibly pointing to other, deeper problems in the family, although not shedding any further light on the suicide question.

Records of the California State Hospital show that Helene’s other daughter, Madeline Yonge, was committed in August 1904 on the strength of testimony by her father, James F.M. Yonge. At the time, Madeline was 28 and single. Her father described her as both suicidal and homicidal.

From the record:

Evidence presented of insanity: “Talks irrationally, says she is certainly going to hell because she has committed so many wrongs. Has threatened to kill her mother. Noisy and violent at times.”

I was unable to find more about Madeline and how she fared after this hospitalization.

Then, following suggestions left in comments, I then started an online search for how to get a copy of a California death certificate. One of the suggestions in the Google search results pointed to a collection of San Francisco funeral records.

And that’s where I found a copy of an original form titled “Record of Funeral.” It’s part of a collection, “California, City of San Francisco, Gantner Bros. funeral records, 1906-1921,” available online at FamilySearch.org and drawn from a collection at the San Francisco Public Library.

It is dated the day of Helene’s death, September 21, 1907. It shows she died at the Emergency Hospital at 7:30 p.m. where the “certifying physician” was a Dr. Neill.

Most importantly, the 1-page document reports the cause of death: “plague suspect-myocarditis.”

So that appears to answer yesterday’s unanswered question of Helene Yonge’s cause of death. While it doesn’t eliminate all doubt, it does provide the best answer I’ll be able to find. And, frankly, I’m surprised that this set of records, and this particular record for an individual death, were so relatively accessible.

View the funeral record here.

A DNA test update: Digging into Chromosome 14

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This post is really a placeholder.

I fully intended to do a serious post this morning.
But….

Instead, here’s a photo taken late Friday afternoon when my favorite pair of Brazilian cardinals landed just outside our deck doors and caught my eye, letting me know that they would appreciate some food being shared with them. Of course, I responded positively to their plea.

Meanwhile, this morning I’ve been sucked down into the genealogy time warp once again.

This started back when my sister, Bonnie, pressed me to submit for a DNA test with Family Tree DNA. At the time, the test she chose tracked DNA back through your direct male lineage. She was interested in the Lind family in Scotland, and wanted to confirm relationships she had found in searching of paper records and inherited family stories.

So I did the DNA test and turned the results over to Bonnie. I wasn’t much interested in who I might be related to from a common ancestor 25 or more generations ago. Then Bonnie passed away in 2016 after a short illness. And I was left with many of the genealogy notes, including some from my mother’s papers, Bonnie’s computer files, and the DNA test.

As I browsed through this stuff, I got more interested in those unknown “cousins” who share one or more common ancestors within the last 5-7 generations. So I did a different “autosomal DNA” test, which tracks DNA inherited from both parents, considered to be fairly accurate in that 5-7 generation range.

Things got more interesting when I found that I share a small but significant number of DNA segments with dozens–maybe hundreds–of people in New Zealand and Australia, many part of large Maori families. So that’s what I’ve been concentrating on, digging town into and trying to find patterns in the DNA matches identified by these tests.

That led to the next step when, several months ago, I created an account at Gedmatch.com, which is a portal into what I’ll just call geek genetic genealogy. It features a set of computer applications that allow “triangulation” of DNA matches.

So, step one, after uploading your DNA test results to the Gedmatch database, then get a list of all the other people who you share a DNA match somewhere along the 23 chromosomes tested. That’s interesting, very long, and not too meaningful.

Step two, where it gets interesting, is to move ahead to triangulation. This bit of fantastic software takes each person with which you have one or more DNA matches, and then compares their DNA to every other one of your matches, finally sorting this new list by chromosome, and the particular segments on each chromosome where your own DNA, and that of other people, all match. This identifies “triangulated or triangulation groups,” where all members of the group are likely to share a common ancestor or, potentially, ancestors (plural).

The strongest matches with people I’ve identified as being in New Zealand and elsewhere in the Pacific (including Hawaii) comes on Chromosome 14, although there are smaller clusters of matches with many of the same people on several other chromosomes.

I used the Gedmatch.com software to identify those in a triangulation group on this chromosome. Here’s an excerpt from the larger set of results.

Each pair of names represents people who have matching DNA in a particular location on Chromosome 14, and both match my DNA at the same location. The last column of numbers indicates the length of the matching DNA segment in centimorgans, a unit for measuring genetic linkages.

I’ve omitted the email addresses, but have been slowly contacting people on the list in the hopes that eventually we will be able to confirm a common ancestor. I’m in the process now of digging through the family histories of two people on the list who are here in Hawaii. On these two, at least, I see enough clues to think that we’ll figure it out. Still no clue, though, about the origin of the DNA matches down with Maori cousins in New Zealand. So the puzzle continues.

Click on the table for a larger image.

It’s easy to fall down a rabbit hole following this stuff. And that’s what has happened to me this morning.