ARGH! Ancestry's new feature is disappointing...

I just discovered THIS:  http://apv.ancestry.com/50558183%3A9009%3A66/overview?treeid=54485674&personid=13681670623

It has the "life story" of Célina Boulé!    Marvelous, you say!  Mystery solved.

Um, not so much.   Here it is:

When Célina Marie Boulé dit Laliberté was born on March 18, 1840, in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada, her father, Célestin, was 47, and her mother, Marie, was 44. She married ALEXANDRE GUIMOND and they had nine children together. She also had one son and three daughters from another relationship. She died on April 18, 1928, in Lotbinière, Quebec, Canada, at the age of 88, and was buried in Lotbinière, Quebec, Canada.

Here are the problems with that:

1. We don't know when or where she was born.   It was AROUND 1840 based on her death record.   No one has ever been able to find anything that conclusively proves the March 18 date; it just gets passed around from Ancestry tree to tree.
2. "Her father Célestin" - except that he's not her father.   People have mixed up two different Célinas; ours has no birth record, and her marriage record does not list her parents.
3. "She also had one son and three daughters from another relationship".  No - she didn't.  That's the OTHER Célina.

This REALLY PISSES ME OFF, because it's being touted as a new "feature" of Ancestry, WITHOUT disclaimers that the data presented might entirely incorrect.

So that means that people who are doing research and don't know to dig under the surface might just "accept" it as fact. 

This completely goes against ALL the principles of genealogy.   Ancestry is being sloppy for the sake of marketing a new "feature" that has no checks and balances.

Updated DNA Ancestry - interesting

So, Ancestry has updated their regional reporting:

• 79% Irish
• 12% English
• 9% French (they didn't have French before)

At the 4th generation back, I have:

• 8 known Irish ancestors
• 2 suspected Irish ancestors (based on last name)
• 2 English ancestors
• 3 French/Québecois ancestors
• 1 unknown origin (Célina Boulé)

So that means:

• 79% Irish vs.  62 1/2%
• 12% English vs. 12 1/2%
• 9% French vs. 18 3/4%

OK - so the English is a great match.   I don't understand the under-reporting of the French because even though a FEW Québec relatives married English or Irish immigrants, they were mostly at the distant cousin level, and not among the direct ancestors, but there are a few Europeans in there (at the 1-2% level or so).

If Célina is French/Québecois, then that would make it 25% French (observed) vs. 9% in the DNA results.  On the other hand, if she is Irish (a famine refugee) then it's 67 3/4% Irish vs. 79% which is a better (but not complete) match.

The only other possibility is that one entire sub-branch of my family (at the 5th generation) is not Québecois but is Irish.   That doesn't seem possible: the other Québecois branch has a set of first-cousins (which is another oddity, but I'll leave that aside) at the 4th generation, which ONLY leaves the Guimond/Sévigny marriage.and there's nothing odd in that family record to suggest that anyone (specifically Elusippe Guimond) was illegitimate.

So we're back to trying to discern what the range of errors are in the reporting.

% DNA shared

When I had the opportunity to discuss genealogy with my (mostly-distant) brother, talking about some distant relative, his response to just about every distant relation was "So, no relation at all."

Of course this was idiotic for several reasons, but mostly it was annoying to me because the math says otherwise.

For direct ancestors you get one share from each parent/grandparent, so:

1. Parent, 50% from each
2. Grandparent, 25% from each
3. Great-grandparent, 12 1/2% from each

and so on.  So basically 2^-N  for each generation "up"?

But what about your ancestor's descendants? 

At first  - not thinking about it - I assumed that in the X,Y notation I use for consanguinity, it'd just be 2^-(X+Y)  but that's wrong.   Why?  Because your uncles/aunt (and Nth grand uncles/aunts), don't suffer that first splitting, since your father/mother and their sibling (your aunt/uncle) also have the same share of DNA from their parents.

So instead it's 2^-Z where Z is:

• X,  if Y ≤ 1;
• X + Y – 1, if Y > 1

Thus:

• For first cousins (X = 2, Y = 2),  it's  2 ^{–(2 + 2 – 1)}  = 1/8 or, 12.5%;
• Second cousins once-removed (4,3 or 3,4) it's 2  ^{–(4 + 3 - 1)} = 1/64 or 1.56%

OK - great.   Of course it's not ALWAYS a direct 50% contribution: there's a range: for first cousins, it's 7.3% to 13.8%.

But if you're family tree is like mine where there's lots of distant relatives marrying distant relative (though not necessarily relations to each other), how do you estimate the shared DNA to their descenants?

So, say your 5th cousin 3x removed (9,6) marries your 3rd cousin 2x removed (6,4).   From the former there's a 1/2^(-14) share and from the latter there's a 1/2^(-9) share.  I think you just add them, and divde by 2.   Or, 0.0061% + 0.1953% = 0.2014% / 2 - 0.1007% for their kid (your 4th cousin 1x removed = 6,5), who if the (9,6) weren't in the picture, would only be 0.0977%.   (Clearly this matters more the closer the relations are - it gets interesting if say, distant cousins on your father's side marries distant cousins on your mother's side.)

"But it's such a tiny number!    Yes, but consider that there are million of base pairs in your DNA.   In terms of all this genetic testing it's expressed in terms of centiMorgans (basically it's a "unit" of DNA).   Parents each contribute about ~3,400 cM, and so you can use the percentage formula to estimate the degree of overlap in DNA.

https://www.yourdnaguide.com/scp/ has a great article and table.   (They also give the range which is helpful, note that anything beyond/outside 3rd cousins (or Z = 7 above) does reach the possibility that you could be related, yet actually share NO DNA with your distant cousin, but by the same token, even eight cousins (Z = 17) could overlap with an average of 12 cM up as high as 50 cM.

Looking at this the other way - if you compare your DNA with someone and get an overlap you can invert the equation above to estimate the number of degrees of separation Z you have.   Comparing that to the cM Project's chart, you'll notice that there is a LOT of overlap among different distant cousins: say you find an overlap of 45 cM.    That's about Z = 7.2, where 3rd cousins are Z  = 7 (74 cM on average, and 4th cousins are Z = 7 (35 cM on average).    But the ranges are what's important (0–217 for 3rd cousins, 0–127 for 4th), plus all of the other cousins (3C1R, 3C2R, 4C2R, etc.) whose ranges also include 45 cM.   That's why your Ancestry DNA or 23andMe "distant relative" matches all have ranges in the predicted relationship; they're doing a comparison of shared DNA segments and comparing them to the expected ranges.

I still need to work out the math for consanguine relationships (e.g., the above example but they're also, say, 3rd cousins to each other).   I think in that case you have to follow each step along the way and apply the 50/50 mix separately (or at least do the formula above UNTIL you get to the consanguine relationship and then go step-by-step the rest of the way "down".

And, as of this morning, we're up to 67,916 people.  :-)

DNA Results #2 - confirmation of... the same unexpected result?

As I mentioned before, I went and splurged on a 23andMe DNA test to correlate with the Ancestry one.   I did this because my DNA breakdown from Ancestry didn't match my expectations:

• 75% British/Irish (the Donahue and Hall lines, plus Bradish)
• 25% French

But the Ancestry results were:

• 91% Ireland/Scotland/Wales (59%) and Great Britain (32%)
• 9% everything else.

But the mapping of that 32% ALSO seems to include parts of France, particularly Normandie where I know is the origination of most of the French ancestors.

Probably not surprising (given that there's like little room for error in the DNA test itself), the 23andMe results are in line with the Ancestry ones:

1. British and Irish:   86.5%
2. French and German:  6.8%
3. Broadly NW European:  5.6%
4. everything else (European):  1.1%

So, lumping all of the non-British/Irish together, that's 13.5%, a little more than only half what I expected.

This leads into the whole "was Célina Boulé" actually an Irish adoptee hypothesis.

If she is French, then the 75/25 expected split is still there: there's just not enough English/Irish in the more distant ancestors to make up a 1/8th discrepancy.

BUT if she's Irish: then 13/16 of my 4th-generation ancestors are British/Irish = 81.25% and everything else is 18.75%.   Given that we know that SOME of the Québec/Acadian ancestors married non-French people (not many, but a few), then we START to get closer to the stated results.

The other thing that's cool about the 23andMe results is that their reporting is more in-depth:

Maternal Haplogroup:  J1c1

This mostly stems from central Europe, the Balkans and the Ukraine.   But I suppose it would extend to France to.

Paternal Haplogroup: R-S15280.1

Very, very Irish.

I'm also more Neaderthal than 68% of 23andMe customers!   Yay!

I was able to get Dad to do both Ancestry and 23andMe tests.   Results pending.   I did this because it will also help with the "is Célina Irish" test since it will let me immediately distinguish for all of the identified "distant cousins" that both sites offer which SIDE of the family they're on (if they're distant cousins of both Dad and me, then they're on the Irish side, otherwise the French/Irish side).  

Hopefully enough of these distant cousins might clump in THEIR overlaps to suggest who Célina really was.

Where things are now...

I've (finally) finished the first- and second-generation Acadiens.

Whew!

This was a lot of work, because most of my typical work flow had to be adjusted: the LaFrance doesn't have the Acadian records (since they only map Québec parishes).   Ancestry has some of them (many of them were destroyed by the British at one time or another).  While there are records for Beaubassin, Port Royal, and Grand-Pré, other locations had no records at all.

Fortunately, I found a web site with the Port Royal records neatly organized by family name and date.

But the abundance of gaps, combined with the entire population of French Acadia being dispersed in the 1750s made things hard to follow:  many went to the British colonies, others to France, and others to other French settlements: Louisiana, Québec or places like Miquelon (where I was also able to find some records).   At first I was puzzled by those who went to New England, the Carolinas, etc.:  why would you leave a British take-over of Acadia to go to another British colony.   Then I found out that most were forcibly deported TO those places by the British with the idea that the displaced families would re-integrate --- the attempt was made to send them to somewhat rural places (e.g., western Massachusetts); however, most didn't stay there and moved to the cities (which the British tried to avoid).    Things were particularly awful in the case of Québec City: an outbreak of measles became an epidemic, and hundreds of people died around 1757-1760, with entire families being wiped out.

Another situation happened while trying to determine if spouses of family members I was researching were also distant cousins (which with the Acadiens was extremely common: consanguine marriages of the 3rd and 4th degree were prevalent): in one case, the spouse ended up having a HUGE family tree archived on WikiTree: we're talking several THOUSAND people hitting pretty much every since royal family in Europe and aristocracy galose) - so that took several weeks to map.   (I would've quit, but my OCD kept me going, and I figure that it'll eventually come in handy if I ever get a breakthrough on the Irish parts of the family tree!)

So, now I'm going through all of the WikiTree entries for the direct descendants, filling in the blanks and getting a sense of what will be involved in finishing up the first- and second- generations mapping for the pre-Québec families.   That'll be the last "phase" of this project.

...  Then we start the third generation with (by my estimate) about 8-9,000 families to map.

Given that it took over three years to get this far, it might be 2021 or so before I'm finished with that.

Genomic Collapse is a Bitch

Sometimes distant cousins marry.

Sometimes not-so-distant cousins marry.

And then there's Jamie and Cersei Lannister, but that's another story.

In any case when this happens, the existence of shared ancestors begins to shrink down the number of people in the family tree, compared to what could possibly be there.

I'm defining "Genomic Collapse" as:

The ratio of unique people in a subset of the family tree to the number of "filled slots" in that subset.

 So in the extreme case of Joffrey Lanister (whose parents were brother and sister), that's 50% genome collapse at a minimum because the maternal and paternal blood lines are identical; and "at a minimum" because another consanguine relationships further up continue to contribute to the genome collapse.

So - what is it for my maternal family tree?

• Out to 10 generations:  41.4% complete tree but with 30.2% collapse (296 people in 424 filled slots out of 2046 total slots);
  
• Out to 15 generations: 5.9% complete but with 49.0% collapse (988 people in 1,937 filled slots out of 65,534 total slots);
  
• Out to 20 generations: 0.2% complete but with 51.4% collapse (1,074 people in 2,208 filled slots out of 2,097,150 total slots).

I'm not sure if this is the right way to do this because one you hit a non-unique ancestor, that effect double with every generation back.

In any case, going from generation to generation it looks like this:

The blue line is the percent overlap at that generation.   The green line is the % overlap for that generation and all the ones preceding it.    The orange line is the highest possible percentage of overlap (i.e., all unknown ancestors for that generation are all repeats of known ancestors), the red line is the lowest possible percentage (all unknown ancestors are new people).

I think I know how to find Célina Boulé

It occurred to me last night as I was falling asleep that I might be able to use the DNA results to identify Célina Boulé's parents.

It's something of a long-shot, but given this tree:

starting with my grandmother, what we're trying to find is the set of 3rd great-grandparents that's missing.  

All of the DNA matching products try to match you up with distant cousins.   I'm slowly making my way through that list of people, looking at their family trees (when they've bothered to make one) to see if I can find common ancestors, and thereby establish our relationship.   A few have had Alexandre Guimond and Célina Boulé as the common ancestor.

But some of these supposedly "high-confidence" matches appear to have no common ancestors.  This got me thinking - what if the common ancestors are the missing parents for Célina Boulé?  And - how could we identify who they are?

What I need to do is find 4th cousins, determined genetically but NOT through a shared family tree.  Why?  Because if we can identify them through a family tree, then we know they're not Célina's parents.    What we want to find are all the 4th cousins for whom it's not possible to find a common ancestor but that we are certain is on the Québec side of the family (because otherwise they might be one of the unknown Irish or British 3rd great-grandparents).

So:

1.  Are we genetic 4th cousins?
2.  Do our family trees overlap in Québec?   (Or not - see below!)
3.  Do we not see any overlap at the 5th generation?    

Note that this isn't as difficult to confirm as you might think.  There are only three family groups to consider:   a) Narcisse Guimond and Céleste Sévigny,  Basile Tousignant and Marguerite Maillot,  and Pierre Bélanger and Thérèse Maillot.  If none of these families are there, then the only one that remains are the parents of Célina Boulé.   

Nonetheless, for this to work, it still requires one other thing:  Célina MUST have a sibling and my 4th cousin must be a descendant of that sibling.   Otherwise my 4th cousin and I will have the same "hole" in the family tree with Célina being a dead-end.

So - given a set of 4th cousin candidates, under the conditions above, the intersection of all of our family trees' common ancestors should point to the parents of Célina Boulé.   This can get tricky, because it's possible that her parents are already in my family tree through some other route.   If that location in the tree is far away from the 3rd great-grandparent position (i.e., they're also C:9,4's or something) it might still work because the DNA correlation for such a distant cousin would be negligible.  

What if Célina is not Québecois?

One of the likely possibilities is that Célina is adopted and might not have a Québec background!  Instead, it's possible she's an Irish immigrant escaping the Irish potato famine.  There's no evidence to support this but the timing fits, and there was a huge influx of refugees from Ireland in 1847 (at which point Célina would be about 7 years old).  Nearly 100,000 immigrants came though quarantine at La Grosse Île, about 30 miles downstream from Québec before being relocated to Québec, Canada West, and the US:

The mortality rate from a typhus was huge: about 1 in 6 died during, or shortly after the crossing.  So, it's also possible that she was orphaned in this way.     There were programs set up for adoption, typically done by the church, where (usually older) children were placed with families.  It was more of a "foster" system than adoption; the children were seen more as convenient labor than part of the family, and typically kept their original family names.   So Célina might be one of the exceptions: if  - as I suspect - she were adopted/fostered by Moïse Boulé and Domitille Bernier (who do not appear to have had any children of their own), she took on their name (at least some of the time).

(Also, "orphan" has a slightly different meaning in the context of the situation:  some "orphans" had a living parent, but one who was not able to care for them (sickness or destitution) which makes the "adoption" more like foster care.

But her Irishness can be tested too, if there's clearly Québec integration from the late 19th century (i.e., Célina's sibling also married into a Québec family and had children) but the only common ancestors are Irish and never Québecois, then that would lend support to the "Célina is an Irish immigrant" theory.

It doesn't appear there's much in the way of records showing which children were placed with which families.  Another avenue I have not attempted is to see if there are other children that might've been adopted/fostered by Moïse Boulé.  

UPDATE: 8/16/2018

No conclusive results - yet!   But an interesting thing came out of the DNA testing.  According to both Ancestry and 23andMe, my DNA is ~85% British/Irish and ~15% everything else.   Based on the locations of ancestors in my family tree, at the 4th generation, I'd expect that to be more like 75/25, UNLESS Célina is Irish, in which case it becomes more like 81/19 which STARTS to look like the actual results.

That doesn't "prove" anything but it's one more datum that supports the hypothesis.

Estimating variance based on family DNA

So I'm still curious about the DNA results...

I'm thinking that the lack for French ethnicity might be due to a weird roll of the dice in terms of the DNA makeup I inherited from my father and mother.   Part of this comes from comparison to a first cousin: we share the Bradish/Guimond side of things but his mother's side of his family is far removed geographically from my father's side of the family.   Yet he comes up with 11% French, whereas I come up with 0%.   Since the overlap is on my mother's side, I think I can safely preclude any "Jerry Springer"-esque explanation.  :-)

So - how to model this?   It occurred to me that getting DNA samples from my father and sister (or brother) might be enlightening.

For my father, there should be roughly 50% overlap (from a zeroth-order assumption).  So anything that doesn't overlap comes from my mother.   If the overlap is far more than 50% (and I'm not a biologist so i don't know if this is a valid hypothesis) then - borrowing from Game of Thrones - "the blood is strong" and genetically, I'm more Irish than French.   I'd expect that my father should come out almost exclusively Irish with some English.   But for my siblings, I suppose anything is possible in terms of the Irish/English/French ratios (unless my hypothesis is entirely invalid).

In the case of my siblings, they should also have roughly the same 50/50 split (as a base assumption), but with different overlaps.   Quantitatively, the difference would be some kind of estimate of the variance within one generation of "shifting" - in other words, "you have your father's nose, but your mother's eyes" might apply to one child, but the opposite for another. 

So, if there's X% variance between siblings, then that effect gets multiplied as you go back in time, complicated by the additional consanguine relationships with in-laws with the eventual "genome collapse" that happens when those family lines intersect from a shared common ancestor.  (The math for that might be completely impossible to do - but I think it would be a fun challenge!).

I also have to wonder to what extent the rabid genome researchers would love to sample the DNA from these ancestors.  Aside from the nasty thought of "grave robbing DNA", it would be extremely interesting and could solve some mysteries.   The biggest dead-end on my mother's side is her great-grandmother Célina Boulé:  was she adopted?  Who are her parents?  It's extremely likely that she is also a distant cousin from some blood line, but I think I've successfully ruled out the handful of "possible relationships" that others have used on their family trees. 

There's also the intriguing -- though I think unlikely -- possibility that she isn't Québecois at all.   Apparently there are cases of Irish children fleeing the potato famine being sent to North America.  Perhaps she's one of them - which would also inject Irish ethnicity into what otherwise would've been a nearly 100% French genome, for me only 4 generations back (so 1/16th overall but 1/4 of the Guimond line).   If it's also true that she was adopted by Moïse Boulé and Domitille Bernier it might make since since as far as I can tell they had no children of their own. 

I have two hopes:  1) that I can get some breakthroughs on my father's side of the family.  Finding a few bona-fide third or fourth cousins might open up some avenues;  2) ditto on the Guimond side, in the hopes that eventually we solve Célina's past.

DNA results - part 2 - distant cousins

So one of the OTHER "features" of the DNA testing is that it's supposed to help you identify potential distant cousins based on likely common ancestors.

From the Ancestry.com side of things, this is something of a bust too.   At least for me.

I've got 55,000+ people on the family tree.   But there are several dead-ends - especially on the Irish side and on the Bradish line.   So I was hoping to find others who might be able to provide a breakthrough or two.

Ancestry has identifed ~250 people with whom I have a shared ancestor.   However looking at their profiles, they fall into three categories:

1. People who took the DNA test but haven't done their family tree - no help there;
2. People who started on their tree but it only has a few (e.g., 10) people on it - no help there;
3. People who have fairly large family trees.  YAY...  but hey - their entries use the same format I do for names, etc...

... oh dear - their family tree is based mostly on getting data from another tree...   Mine!

Oh well  :-)

But there is one first-cousin whose tree has a different set of parents for John Patrick Bradish (the great-grandparent who was born in Punjab) and they're Irish not English.   This changes the Ethnicity assessment (skewing from mostly English to mostly Irish).   The parents I have came from Google search, are VERY low-confidence, and relied on the assumption they'd be English (since he served in the British army).   Although Ireland was part of Great Britain at the time, it just seemed to me to be unlikely many people would enlist in the British Army from Ireland.   But that might not be a valid assumption at all, and even if it were, it doesn't mean that this is an exception to the rule!

Something to follow up on!

DNA Result are in... What the hell?

So I get my Ancestry DNA results.

• 59% Ireland/Scotland/Wales 
• 32% Great Britain
• 8% Other

I expected:

• 50% English (based on the Bradish/Murphy and the Hall/Murphy lines, but see the next posting)
• 25% Irish (Donahue line)
• 25% Frence (Guimond line)

Where's the French?

Now all the Ancestry DNA ads have some kind of "Find Exciting Surprises" where someone takes the test thinking they're an Italian/German mix and discover they're 80% Russian and 20% Japanese or something like that.

But the largest chunk of my family tree that's mapped are Québecois - and I have HUNDREDS (probably a few thousand at this point) of original settlers who were born in FRANCE.   Now I know SOME of them started out somewhere else, went to France and from there went to Québec.   I know that some of the immigrants came from England, Ireland, Germain, Switzerland, Spain, and Italy.  But not THAT many.

I don't know what to make of this.   We've joked that there's some kind of "Jerry Springer" episode in here somewhere "you are NOT the father" - except that it would have to be "you are NOT the mother" and that would be difficult to pull off since surrogate motherhood is definitely more of a 21st century occurrence.

But there are other possibilities.   The Ethnicity estimate comes from where your current-day relatives who have taken the DNA test reside NOW.   So one might expect some degree of variance from that.  EXCEPT that one could do the appropriate weighting based upon coverage of test subjects versus actual population (and they have to do this I think, otherwise NO ONE's results would be accurate).

There's also the fact that one doesn't necessarily inherit the same degree of genetic material from EACH ancestor proportionally.   Perhaps "the blood is strong" (to quote John Arryn) is in play here, and just that my paternal contributions to my DNA overtake the maternal.   

So I think I'll splurge and get a comparison test with 23andMe.   I'm also wondering if I can convince dad or a sibling to also do the test so that we can compare.

Hey! Wait a minute...

So I'm knee-deep in Acadians.   The records are tricky because once the English invaded and started forcibly removing them, they moved around.   A lot.

Many escaped to Québec, others ended up back to France.   Some settled elsewhere in the Saint-Lawrence River islands:  Miquelon, Prince Edward Island, the Iles-de-Madeleine, etc., and some went to other French colonies: Louisiana, and the Caribbean (Haiti, Guadeloupe, etc.).

But many ALSO went to the (now) USA:  Boston, the Carolinas, Georgia, and so on.

This doesn't make any sense to me.   If you've just been invaded by a foreign empire, why would you travel to that empire's colonies? 

But there's a simple explanation --- tt turns out that this was actually the British government's doing; at first they "relocated" Acadians to the British Colonies, to rural parts of Massachusetts, New York, and so on.  However this cunning plan didn't work out the way they wanted:  the Acadians refused to stay and just to the cities forming Francophone communes or tried to get back to Canada (which is exactly what the British did NOT want to happen).   So, the second wave of deportations were made to France instead.

From THERE, many once again moved - this time from France either back to the St. Lawrence River settlements, or south to the Caribbean and Louisiana (which I just learned came under Spanish control in 1762 - I really need to bone up on this history).  Some even went as far as the Falkland Islands! 

I've also noticed that many died shortly after leaving Acadie.   The records in Québec are rife with burial of Acadians in 1759.   But I'm also finding similar spikes in deaths in France among the repatriated Acadians.  (Some others apparently died at sea trying to get to France.)

Phase 1 1/2: The Acadians

So, I've got about 25-30 Acadian familes (from generations 8 to 15) to do.

Not sure how successful this will be because there isn't quite the comprehensive indexing that there is for the Québec familes: some of them are in the PRDH, but typically not in Lafrance, although many are also in the GQAF.

The canonical material is from S.A. White published in 1999 but out of print.  A revised 10-volume set is in preparation but with no projected date of release.

• More info and a short background

So - was my estimate right?

Way back when (May 2015), I estimated the number of great-aunts/uncles and 1st cousins N times removed there'd be in the tree based upon a calculated average of 5.8 children per family.

What I came up with was 1,673 aunts/uncles (when I started the project).   It ended up being 2,184.

Why the difference?   Some thoughts:

1. The estimate was based on my mother's side of the family only.  Now while my father's branch of the family tree is meager in comparison, it does add a few dozen people.
   
2. The estimate was based only on generations 3 through 10.   I actually ended up working out to generation 13 (although far from complete). 
   

So - now that I've done the 1st cousins N times removed (8,245 of them) - that ends up being short of the expected 9,760.   Why is that?

Two things, I think.   First in the estimate going from direct ancestors to aunts/uncles, we KNOW that each of them were married (they're grandparents, after all) whereas there's no guarantee that every child who is an aunt/uncle will also have children (some die early, others never marry, etc.).   Another effect is that single-marriage families might have children over a period of 20 years or more, multiple marriage families have a shorter window, which means fewer children per family.

Without looking at every aunt/uncle and removing all the cases where there are no children (code which I could write I suppose), getting an accurate measurement from the aunts/uncles to 1st cousins to estimate the family size for 2nd cousins would be difficult.

In any case, the ratio of 1st cousins to aunt/uncles is 3.8 instead of 5.8 which is essentially an "effective" family size (i.e., counting non-married people in as a family size of zero).

So - I suppose to zeroth-order, the estimate number of 2nd cousins (the C:X,3's on the tree) should be about 31,000 people.  Given that I seem to be able to add about 10K people/year,  I guess we should expect the next report on this to happen in Spring 2021.   :-)

Ancestry DNA kit was sent off 2/26.   Should come back in about 3-4 weeks.

My guess - based on what I have on the tree:

1. About 50% English
2. About 25% French
3. About 25% Irish

Depending on how far back it gets, I expect to see some Viking, some Native Canadian, and some other central Europe (Germany, Spain, Italy).

What would be VERY interesting would be if this in any way helps me crack some of the dead-ends.

I guess we'll see.

Well, I've reached a milestone...

I've just finished cataloging every Québec ancestor, their children, and their grandchildren from my 4th great-grandparents (generation 6) all the way to the original settlers (generation 12 or 13, depending).

That's taken about 2 years. 

The tree now has 55,182 people on it.

It's quite complete.   The only major missing piece of the puzzle the long-standing question of who Céline Boulé/Laliberté's (generation 4) parents are. 

Now what?

I can start on the Acadiens.

Or I can start cataloging the great-grandchildren of ancestors (I estimate there are about 50,000 of them).

But I think first I'll do some analysis and statistics!

A New Resource (and it's FREE!)

Somehow (I forget what I was doing at the time) I stumbled upon the Généalogie du Québec et d'Amérique française website (http://www.nosorigines.qc.ca).   It appears to be a community-driven site to compile a single family tree of Québec ancestors.

I'm finding it extremely helpful!   For example:

1. It shows birth/baptism and death/burial dates and locations;
2. It shows parents and children;
3. It has FAR better direct information for the immigrant generation and THEIR parents (and sometimes their grandparents) which neither the PRDH and esp. Tanguay do!  Some records even have links to images for 16th/17th French baptismal records!
4. Most entries list their sources which makes it easier to confirm conflicting data.

But - as always - there are caveats:

1. I've found mistakes - at the very least discrepancies with the PRDH; most of the time it appears to be people mixing up siblings.   However in one case it correctly identified a HUGE mistake I had made thinking that a 8th GGF was really two separate people (him and his son).   As always, it's best to be careful!
2. It's completion is spotty, esp at that awkward era post-1780 when Tanguay's data evaporates, and you're at the edge of what the PRDH has complete.   
3. It splits up the children for each couple into "married" and "not-married" for some reason.   I've found cases where a child was put into the latter category when I know they were actually married (this typically happens when the marriage is post-1800 - again that fringe of where the other archives are also less complete).
4. Because this is community-driven - unless the references are on the record, it's not always certain whether the data are correct.   One of the areas that I'm mostly concerned about are place names.   I regularly find discrepancies - but I don't know if this is a case where a person was born in place X but the baptism record was registered in place Y (this is rather common), or if the person entering the record just has it wrong, or something else.  

In any case, it's speeding up the process of checking spouses to see if they're blood relatives, and I'm saving $$$ not having to hit the PRDH quite as often.

(In case there's anyone on the planet keeping track - which I doubt - I'm on family #95 of ~220 on the "get all of the Nth great-uncle/aunt families completely mapped".   I should post my workflow.)

Milestone Reached:  Person #40,000

Charles Prévost (1705-1743), a first cousin 10x removed {C:12,2}.

So it's taking about 1 year to get each 10,000 people.   Most of the ones added in the last year aren't actually blood relatives: they're ancestors of in-laws of relatives that I have to look up to determine whether or not someone along the way is a distant cousin.

But I trudge on, still working out all of the 1st cousins N times removed.  I'm about 1/3 of the way through that project.   Currently I'm on great-grandparent set #79 our of ~205.

Questions...

There are some odd things, etc. that I have run across in Tanguay, Drouin, and the PRDH.

1. Sometimes, there are footnotes in Tanguay in death or burial entries "dans l'église".   I can't figure out the context of this:  does it mean they literally died in the church, or that they were buried within the church, or something else?   The burial records frequently say "buried in the cemetery of this parish" which stands to reason, but since Tanguay seemed to go out of his way to note this, it probably isn't something that should otherwise be obvious.
   
2. Drouin records usually mentions consanguineous relationships, and sometimes there's an insert with the record of an actual document of dispensation (I suppose that's when one of the spouses is from a different parish than where the marriage is taking place) that are in Latin.
   
   However, I've run across situations where there is most-certainly a close relation between the husband and wife (e.g., second or third cousins) but there is NO mention of their relationship in the marriage record.  
   
   Was this just negligence on the part of either the church to do due diligence, or of the families to not inform the church of the relationship (and I suppose in some cases they didn't know, I suppose)? 
   
   I've also found dispensation documents that do NOT appear to bring up consanguinity, but my Latin is poor enough that I can't coax out what the underlying issue might've been.
   
3. Drouin records will note the residence of parties, but not consistently.   I frequently find that while MOST of the children in a family are born in a single place (or there's an obvious relocation at some point), there's one or two children baptized in another place.   I know that sometimes this is because the local priest was not available immediately after the birth, and that families would go to a nearby church to have the child baptized.   But sometimes the location is NOT just "the next town over".   It seems weird to think there would be much traveling going on in the 1700's (or earlier) of women in late-term pregnancies, but I suppose it could be the case.
   
4. What's the deal with Drouin records getting ages at death SO wrong SO often?   I've found situations where the baptism record is available (and sometimes in the same parish) but the age at death is 5 or more years off.   Strangely, marriage records tend to be closer to the mark - 1 or 2 years off at worst.
   
5. Why do some people have a shift in given name?   I've seen several cases where someone named - say - "Marie-Marguerite" on their baptism record and marriage record(s) is listed as "Marie-Louise" on the burial record, even though it's clear from the record that I have the right person.

At some point I should try to sort these out.

OK - Strap Yourself In - This Gets Complicated

So:  once upon a time there were two people in love:  Michel Lebeuf (c1710-c1764) and my 7th great-grand aunt Madeleine Tessier (1720-1798).   They married in Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade in 1739 and had 12 children.  Three died at birth, and 8 of the remaining 9 children married.

The youngest six of them have the most complicated inter-married relationships I have discovered thus far.

(Click to enlarge.)

Madeleine's father, Pierre Tessier (7th great-grandfather, 1698-1727) was a third-generation Québecois.  Three of Madeleine's cousins (of uncle René) among them had 4 children (all second cousins to each other) who each married one of Madeleine's children.

First, Angélique marries second cousin Jean-Baptiste Morand (son of Madeleine's cousin Marie) in 1777.   Just over a year later, younger sister Marie-Joseph marries Pierre Tessier, son of Madeleine's cousin Pierre-René (who is cousin Marie-Joseph's older brother).  Next Alexis marries Madeleine Vallée whose mother is Madeleine's cousin Marguerite, younger sister of Pierre-René and twin sister to Marie-Joseph!  (I find myself VERY curious if they were fraternal or identical twins...).  Finally, youngest daughter Madeleine (1757-1846) marries Basile (son of Pierre-René) in 1782.

So all of them have the common ancestor Édouard Tessier (1677-1750, 8th great-grandfather) in common.

But it gets even more complicated when you add Édouard's father Mathurin Tessier (1630-1703) into the mix.

Édouard has a sister Marie-Jeanne (b. 1685) who is an 9th great-grand aunt.   She marries Jean-Baptiste Gervais in 1700 (at age 14!) and has a son Pierre in 1701 (who is a 1st cousin 9x removed).   He marries Elisabeth Vallée (b. 1703) and through two of their children: Françoise — born 1737 — and Louis-Joachim we reach the two other children of Madeleine Tessier, but in slightly different ways.   Joachim marries Geneviève Lebeuf in 1771, which makes them 2nd cousins 1x removed.  Joachim's sister Françoise marries Louis Maillot (1739-) and it's their daughter Françoise (1762-) who marries Pierre(her 3rd cousin) in 1780.

Fortunately the eldest two sons, Michel and Joseph didn't marry into this web (that I can tell), and daughter Marie-Joseph (#1, for some reason they named two of their daughters Marie-Joseph) either died young (before Marie-Joseph #2 was born; the recycling of names is common, and to me a very strange custom), or was an old maid.

Nonetheless, if you happen to see this and lean that Madeleine is a direct ancestor of yours, you just might want to do some DNA screening...  Just sayin'.    I have no idea what inter-marrying happens in the NEXT generation (I probably won't get to the second-cousins N times removed until late 2017 at the earliest), but I think I'd be a little "concerned" if history repeats itself.

More marriage weirdness - Noël Barabé (c1669-1747)

As I'm going through the family tree, I'm frequently surprised by the intricate circumstances of marital relationships I encounter.   We're continually fed this idea that live was MUCH simpler in days gone by, and that the norm was that one man married one woman for life, in comparison to the norms of today where people marry, divorce, raise families outside of marriage, etc.

But while cultural norms change over time, the idea that we've moved from some simplistic "ideal" to a more-complicated set of domestic arrangements is somewhat misleading.   In reality - as I continue to discover - sometimes circumstances could be just as abnormal then as now.   I suppose it's yet another example of the conditions in early Québec - the comparative isolation of communities, combined with what probably was a pragmatic response to circumstances of availability, e.g., the programs set up by France to increase the population of women in Québec in the mid-1600s: the "Filles à Marier" and the "Filles du Roi". 

The harsh conditions of life and care meant that many people died young: men in the course of work, women from complications of child birth, not to mention disease, and also through violence from attacks by the native population (as well as battles with the British).   Providing continued care for families - many with young children meant re-marriages were extremely common;  it was an early-on revelation to me that the time frame from the death of a spouse to a re-marriage seemed EXTREMELY short - frequently only a few months.   But while all of this happened, some of the specific re-organizing of families (and their respective family trees) can sometimes appear to be rather "un-conventional".

The most well-known trope is cousin marriages, and consanguinity does appear all over the population, mostly among second cousins (or more distant relations), though first-cousin marriage definitely take place (though it's not quite AS frequent as I expected).   What's more common than I had expected are situations where siblings marry people who are also siblings (i.e., all the in-laws are shared).   Where it gets strange (at least to me) is where there are marriages involving someone with an in-law of one of their children: for example, a daughter (say Marie) in family X marrying a son (say François) in family Y.  Marie's mother dies (or has died) and her father re-marries a woman who is either the François' mother  (making Marie and François step-siblings à la Greg and Marsha Brady), or even weirder/creepier François' sister (making Jan both Greg's sister-in-law AND step-mother)!

Today I came across another strange situation, that of 7th great-grandfather Noël Barabé and his relations with the Tousignant family (Pierre Tousignant dit LaPointe and Marie-Madeleine Philippe[1]). 

He first marries eldest daughter Marie-Marguerite in 1687.   They have a son Jean-Baptiste in c. 1689.   They might also have a daughter, Marie-Renée out of wedlock (we know that Noël is her father, but her mother is not mentioned).   There's no other mention of other children, but Marguerite dies before 1697 because Noël marries Marguerite's sister Michelle (who is my 7th great grandmother) around 1697.

I enjoy trying to sort out what to call the familial relationships:  Noël and Michelle have 10 children who are Jean-Baptiste's first cousins AND step-siblings.   He grows up with "aunt Michelle" who becomes "step mom Michelle".  I have to wonder how families adjusted when the labels of relationships change - did the adopt the new nomenclature, or stay with the old?

(I'm also curious as to what Marie-Renée's life was like - there's no information about her life other than her birth date.   Illegitimacy was more commonplace than the record (or the church) would suggest: genome analysis of the Québec population reveals that the church records on parentage could be off as much as 10%!)



[1] Marie-Madeleine Philippe was a Fille du Roi.