Fearless Females, March 2: Jenny Burns

I missed the first day and I have a very busy month ahead of me, but I'm going to try to participate as much as I can in The Accidental Genealogist's Fearless Females daily prompts for Women's History month. 

Today's is simple: "Post a photo of one of your female ancestors. Who is in the photo? When was it taken? Why did you select this photo?"

Here's my photo:

This is Jane "Jenny" Robertine Burns, my great-great-great-grandmother. This photo is one of my all-time favorites, and has been pretty popular over on my Flickr photostream, too, so it was a natural choice.

I have no idea when or where this photo was taken, but it's by far the youngest picture of her I've ever seen. All I can suggest is that she is not wearing a wedding ring, so the picture was probably taken before her marriage to Thomas Fogden Overington, which took place on June 5, 1855. Long-time readers may remember my post last year about this wedding.

A little more about Jenny:

• She was born on January 27, 1836 in Frankford, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
• Her parents were Dr. Robert Bruce Burns, a Scottish immigrant, and Elizabeth Love Yarnall, a Philadelphian woman.
• She had one older sister and eight younger siblings.
• She married her husband Thomas when she was 19 and he was 26.
• They had two sons, John (1864) and William (1871).
• The family lived at the Overington mansion "Oaklands" at 4606 Leiper Street in Frankford, which is now Overington Park.
• They attended services at Trinity Church Oxford in Oxford and its daughter institution, St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Frankford (which the Overingtons helped to found).
• Thomas passed away in 1877 at the age of 48, unusually young for his family (for example, his father passed away in 1892 just a month before his 100th birthday). He was buried at Trinity Church Oxford in Oxford, Philadelphia.
• Jenny lived another fifty years, but wore a widow's mourning black every day for that half-century.
• She passed away on September 4, 1927 at the age of 91. She was buried beside her husband.

More photos:

Jenny with her granddaughter Claudia "Poppy" Overington, on or about May 16, 1906

And her gravestone:

AncestryDNA Reference Post

I've decided that it would be beneficial and convenient for me and my family to have a page where all our AncestryDNA results are listed together, for reference. I also decided that I will make it public because this information is more or less public on Ancestry.com already, and perhaps it will be informative to my readers if you are interested in the AncestryDNA test and what the results look like. I've included the modern-day locations of each of these ethnicities, as provided by Ancestry. Results also come with a bunch of information about each of these regions, including details on migrations into and out of the region to help you understand how your ancestors might have ended up where you are.

Some people may wonder what will happen if they get the test and do it wrong. Well, it turns out that I can answer that question. If the sample received in the lab doesn't contain enough genetic material, they will send you an email with a link to order a replacement kit free of charge. We've had this happen with one of our samples, and Ancestry was very good about it. We are currently awaiting the replacement kit.

I will continue to update this page as more results come in. If you are one of the people I have ordered a test for and want to know its status, these are listed at the bottom of this post, below the results. I will update it as soon as something changes.

If you are one of my friends and I manage a family tree for you on Ancestry.com and you are interested in this DNA test, please let me know. The test costs $129 when ordered by a subscriber (like me) and $199 when ordered by a non-subscriber so the advantage is obvious. The downside is that the results will be linked to my account and not yours, but I will definitely keep on top of the information and keep you updated if you choose to do the test.

Photos of Couples, 1852-1974

So this isn't a terribly substantial post, but it's something I've wanted to do for a long time. The semester is coming to an end and I find myself incredibly busy, so this is the relatively simple project that is getting tackled this month. I put together all the photos of couples in my family tree. Many are aunts and uncles or cousins, but several are my direct ancestors. They are arranged in chronological order.

Mary Elizabeth Redding & Russell Howard McKee

married on October 13, 1852

James Wilkinson Gammon & Armilda Eliza Myers

married on November 19, 1852 in Monroe, IA

Isaac Newton Morrison & Lydia Josephine Gammon

married in December 1879 in Centerville, IA

Anna Mary Seufer & Newton Franklin Gammon

married on February 14, 1880 in Decatur County, IA

Katharine Rebecca Wilson & John Overington

married on November 5, 1889 in Philadelphia, PA

William Overington, Jr. & Claudia Wetherill Fries

married on November 16, 1903 in Philadelphia, PA

 

Walter Smart McKee & Willie May Maxson

Albert Clate Gammon & Abigail Ruth Lester

married on January 1, 1907 in Ringgold County, IA

James Mathias Gammon & Carrie Bernice McKee

married on November 9, 1921 in Los Angeles, CA

Edgar Percival Jones and Claudia Overington

Howard McKee Gammon & Claudia Overington Newman

married on June 3, 1944 in Roswell, NM

Gisele & Walter Leonard McKee

  

Jack Leroy Upper & Claudia Overington Reid

married in 1950

Shirley Bubadias & Victor Carl Fetzer

married on August 2, 1953 in Neptune, NJ

Jim Gammon & Wanda Starnes

married on November 25, 1974 in Bel Air, MD (shown)

and on July 16, 1983 in Belmar, NJ

My Incredible AncestryDNA Story

A few weeks ago, I spit in a tube and mailed it to Ancestry.com. No, really. It's part of their new program, now in the beta stage, called AncestryDNA. I won't go into the details because their website does a much better job of it here. It's just become available to the general public for $199 or to Ancestry.com subscribers for $129. The test traces your genetic code back hundreds of years. I am not in any way compensated for my promotion of AncestryDNA, I simply find it a very worthwhile investment. My results were, to say the least, shocking.

Screenshot of my actual AncestryDNA results. Click to enlarge.

I'm almost three-quarters Scandinavian! If you'd have asked me before I took this test, I would have told you I was three-quarters British and one-quarter German and who knows what else. As you can see on the map, sixteen of the ancestors in my family tree were born in the UK and two in Germany. Everyone else that I know the birthplace of was born in the United States or Puerto Rico.

As baffling as this was at first, it has come to make a certain amount of sense. Over the last thousand years, Scandinavians made various invasions into the rest of Europe. The most likely scenario is that my ancestors were Scandinavians that migrated into central and southern Europe, married the locals, and then moved, as many people did, into the UK in later generations. It seems a colossal coincidence that they then married other people of Scandinavian descent, particularly once they made it the US, but it's not impossible. I hope to get my parents and grandparents to take the DNA test as well to get a more detailed view, as my DNA contains only a selection of each of theirs.

Now, I promised you an incredible story and although so far it's been a strange and unexpected one, I wouldn't call it incredible. The real story here is in another feature of AncestryDNA, which shows you a list of members that share genetic markers with you and are likely to be your cousins. They're sorted by the estimated distance of the relationship. My very first result was a user named Terry_Cott. I didn't even think twice about his name until after I clicked on it and Ancestry suggested that, based on our trees, we shared a common ancestor - Joseph Cott.

Joseph Cott has always been something of a mystery to me, and someone I thought I'd never know the full truth about. That's probably still true, but in the past week I have learned far, far more about him than I ever thought I would. So, a little background is required. Joe was my great-grandfather - my mother's mother's father. We knew him as Joseph Cott Bubadias, a truck driver. He was my great-grandmother's second husband, and they had six children together before he abandoned the family. He moved to north Jersey, changed his last name to Cott, and had another family, including two daughters. I knew from my research that Joe was married to a woman named "Kath" after my great-grandmother. I knew his birth year varied depending on the record, as did his birthplace - sometimes it was Oklahoma, sometimes Puerto Rico. On one record, he even indicated his race as Cherokee. I was hopelessly lost in contradicting information. I felt like he was laughing at me from beyond the grave, as if he had intentionally muddled the trail to stop me from knowing the truth.

We thought that was the end of the story until Terry got back to me. As it turns out, Joe's birth name was Jose Cott, and he was born in Puerto Rico. Terry is Joe's grandson through his first marriage, a marriage that my family didn't know anything about. His father is my grandmother's half-brother. He is my mother's first cousin. Terry and I are still exchanging emails and photos. It will take some time for both of us to adjust to knowing one another. Maybe someday we will meet.

For now, this is just the incredible story of how my DNA connected my grandmother and the brother she's never met.

My grandmother Phyllis in 1952.

My great-aunt Shirley in 1953.

Terry's father Allen Cott in 1943.