Eureka - I think I found it! Part I

Eureka! I think I found the answer! But sometimes the answers leave you with more questions. My 30-year-old brick wall is a case in point:

Harry Hughes

Harry Hughes was born 31 Dec 1874 in Chester, Cheshire, England. His father’s name was Samuel. When Harry was still young, he left England with his father and went to Canada. Harry crossed the border to the U.S. at Niagara on foot in July 1891 or 1892. I’m not sure how much time was spent in Canada nor am I positive he traveled with Samuel. But the rest of the above information is fairly consistent across records including alien registrations, WWI draft registration, IOOF membership, railroad pension documents, and death certificate.

The first census record I can find for him is in 1920 in Hennepin County, Minnesota, after he married my husband’s grandmother, Anna Kline. I can’t find any record of a Harry with father Samuel in England. The Harry Hughes(es) that I have found online had different fathers and seemed to have stayed in England.

Harry's father, Samuel

I queried my mother-in-law extensively prior to her death several years ago and she claimed to not know very much. She said that she was named for him (Harriet Priscilla) and that his name was Harry Percy Hughes. But he always entered “None” in the middle name field or left it blank when he filled out forms. She also said he was either born in England or Wales. I can see that Chester is very close to Wales. She also thought he might have worked “out east” for some years.

His father, Samuel’s death certificate has no helpful information, nor does his own. Harry’s mother’s name isn’t even on Harry's death certificate. So who the heck is this guy and where is he from?

Harry's wife, Anna Kline

I turned to DNA for some help. One of my husband's first cousins tested so I started with their shared match list. I then needed to eliminate all the matches that were related through Anna Kline's line. This was relatively easy as Anna Kline was 100% Icelandic, born just a couple of years after her parents arrived in Minnesota from Iceland. Anna Kline may not sound like an Icelandic name but the entire family adopted the last name Kline after arriving in Minnesota and she used Anna instead of her birth name.

Just to give an idea of the number of matches I was working with, my husband has over 50,000 matches on Ancestry. He shared only 54 4th-cousin or closer matches with his first cousin. Of those, only 7 could be identified as probably coming from the Harry Hughes line.

Using the shared matches feature with those 7, I was able to add some more distant matches to the group which I colored coded using Ancestry's group system. Once I added matches to the group, I chose just that group from the Group drop-down menu to limit my view to just those matches. At that point, the URL showed the group number as the last four characters of the URL.

I then used geneticaffairs.com auto-clustering and chose to use the group number from Ancestry. I extended the clusters and also asked for family trees, using cM thresholds of 250 cM and 9 cM. A total number of 24 matches were identified that were used for an AutoCluster analysis.

My Q & D Match Trees

The results were interesting. As it turned out, geneticaffairs.com tree feature wasn't helpful in this case as not many of the matches had enough information for the program to create a shared tree. So I created trees manually. There were several matches with individual online trees, some very small, but enough to start building a quick and dirty (Q&D) tree. I created a tree called Hughes Research Tree and using Ancestry I used their hints to build those trees back into the mid-18th century. I added siblings and others when possible as they might be the actual link I need.

Ancestry doesn't make it easy to create separate trees in one research tree but it is possible. I wanted them in one place so I could look at the combined list of all people. I could examine the list for duplicate people or surnames that pop up in more than one tree. I also printed the trees out and hung them up so that I could look at them all at once.

One thing I noticed with Ancestry's tree printing is that it prints the birth, marriage and death dates AND locations for everyone. This was very helpful for me. When viewing the online tree you don't see the locations unless you click on each person. I highlighted the people on the printed trees who had locations of Cheshire or Lancashire, England.

Interestingly, the matches that were the most helpful came from Australia. One tree looked quite promising but it was private. I reached out to the tree owner and she was very helpful in quickly giving me the information I needed to construct that part of the tree.

I had a few surnames that matched across a couple of trees but the names weren't yet meaningful to me. The name Hughes popped up on two trees but it is such a common name in that area that I didn't want to put too much weight on that.

So nothing jumped out at me yet but I felt like I was getting closer and now at least I had names in front of me. What to do next? I could spend more time working on the match trees. I could revisit the searches I made in the past at Ancestry.com, Findmypast.com, and FamilySearch.org. But I opted to step back and review my file of "Possible Hughes Connections."

There's something to be said for reviewing information in your files. You never know what might jump out at you when you have new information. What could possibly be in those files that might shed new light on this old problem?




Photos in collection of author.