The Gnarled Tree

In my last post I eluded to a more painful déjà vu that I experience while digging around the family tree.  What I am referring to is a tad bit taboo. The marrying of cousins. I know, the first reaction is like sucking on a lemon or smelling sour milk. Let's just be happy that it occurs less now than it did in the past.

I use an online application that makes a wonderful graphic of my family tree for me as you we have all come to expect it to look.  It's handy.  It gives you a master view at the bottom...so you can see just HOW BIG it is...

The bottom row represents the family of one of my 4 grandparents. ONE. The second row are my great grandparents and my great grandfather's cousins. So ... many ... people. 

Sometimes this program glitches out on me and shows crossed lines and double people where their shouldn't be, which causes me to groan. The issue isn't so much the program as it is my family tree. Let's talk about the Pugh family.

Hugh Pugh and his wife Elizabeth Williams came to Canada in the range of 1835-1840. They came with some of their 15 adult children whom also had children. The number of Pugh's that landed in Pickering township must have been terrifying. Okay I kid a little. The child of theirs that happens to be my 3rd great grandmother Elizabeth Pugh married James T White, the son of some English settlers who had come to the area at the beginning of the 1830's. James White was one of 7 children born to his parents.  Apparently one of the other White children, William White, took a liking to Elizabeth Pugh's sister, Mary Pugh - as they got married sometime around 1850 and had 5 children.  This makes Elizabeth and James White's 8 children and Mary and William White's 5 children: double first cousins. This is part of the reason my tree glitches out when I try to view the Pugh people.   There are other reasons too, though and then this comes to mind:

from meiphoto.com

The number of descendants that come from Hugh Pugh and Elizabeth Williams, at this moment to me, is an  unknown number. What is known to me however, are the instances when some of them would marry each other.  Pickering township wasn't a particularly small place - it had several hamlets, towns, villages - all which had a few Pugh descendant families. So it isn't terribly surprising there was some distantly generational mixing going on, right? I try to tell myself it isn't weird. A rudimentary illustration of what a computer program can't handle...paper to the rescue!!  This is an example of what happens when two families have some intermingling....

C'est Déjà Vu

I used to have frequent bouts of déjà vu - French, for the feeling that you have already experienced something.  If you are interested in some of the theories about what déjà vu might be, a wonderful page on a corner of the internet has some thoughts about the subject. What does this have to do with family history?

Some days doing research I have the feeling. I've seen these names before - this seems familiar. So down that rabbit research hole I go.  A little while ago I got excited at doing some family searching for someone new.  With a little bit of information and a little bit of using a search engine that sounds like Boogle, I was able to establish a tree.  I began to plug away at records and adding people, their marriages, their children and so on. 

One thing I have noticed in the various trees I have put together is that generally families remained in the same regions for many many years. When a member of the family is found to have moved far away I begin to a) check that my information is correct and b) wonder what forces pushed and pulled them so far away from their families.  While working on one branch of this family tree (I'll call M) I found a marriage that took place where the groom's last name was recorded as O'Dougherty and he was listed as having been from Mayo, Quebec.

This was big, to me.  The M tree I was working on wasn't any 'ordinary' tree.  It is for my coworker...okay, my Manager. The branch I had rabbit holed into was on her husbands side and the reason it had become interesting was because a member had moved out of this area to about 350km away at a time when it would not have been a very pleasant trip.  The other half of the big part of this discovery is that my partner happens to be a Doherty, also from Mayo, Quebec. 

I blinked a few times and thought, well maybe this O'Dougherty is some other family in Mayo. My hair isn't blond but I'm beginning to feel a bit like Alice and off I go to figure out who the identity of this O'Dougherty.  I didn't find much except he had various spellings of his last name and later in life dropped the O' (being Irish hasn't always been something to brag about unfortunately).  There were not necessarily any O'Dougherty families in Mayo and the church records have various spellings: O'Dougherty, Dougherty, Dockerty, Doherty. I'm guessing how it was spelled was dependent upon the competency of the writer as well as the thickness of the accent of the speaker who claimed the name. So, relation status: unconfirmed but likely.

But wait, there is more!!

"Small world" occurrences tend to fascinate me so I continued to branch out this particular arm of the tree.  The online application I use allows other users to share pictures and information and crowd source together - this is most helpful when approaching years where records are not available (in Canada that is basically anything newer than 1920's).  I began to come across pictures of these distance cousins in the M tree...when I had the déjà vu.  There was a user name that seemed very familiar.  So I clicked on the name to find out more information as I am want to do.

The user has pictures of my great-great grandparents.Whaaa? Ok, I now need to find out a) how this person is related to me and b) how this person is related to the M tree.

It turns out my cousins (of some variety) married the cousins of my managers husband. This is crazy! Her children's cousins are married to my cousins! If the Doherty connection is to be believed my cousins may also be married to my partner's cousins...I thoroughly worked it out however - in no way are we actually related. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if everyone lived in the same geographical area but this isn't the case. Myself and my family are from 350km west of this city, the cousins that moved away and eventually married into my branches are from 350km west of here as well...but the two are 200km north-south from each other.  In a city of 900 000 people what are the odds I would be working with someone with such a tangible connection?

Stay tuned for my next installment of the case of slightly more painful déjà vu!