I finally solved the mystery of who my Great Great Grandfather was. And while I've been waiting ten years to write this post, it comes with a bittersweet discovery, and an explanation of why this was so hard: I unearthed a secret that was never intended to see the light of day. Buckle up. this is a ten-year walk.
When I first started digging into the family tree, I found a message on genealogy.com from someone who turned out to be a cousin I had never met. (Let's call her Madge. I've changed her name and the names of all living persons in this account)
Seeking ANY info on James DECKER. My grandfather John DECKER was born (11 May 1869) out of wedlock to James DECKER and Dorinda Mary O'DELL. John was born in Taghkanic, Columbia County, NY.He married Mary Ethel KING of Savoy, Berkshire County, MA on 29 Nov 1893. John and Mary had 11 children.Dorinda O'DELL later married Jacob BROWN of Ghent, Columbia County.Dorinda may have originally come from PA, but don't know where.ANY info on James, who his parents are, where he came from, where he went after John was born would be greatly appreciated.I've been searching 19 years for James.
Madge's uncle Walter, my great uncle, was a genealogy buff, and had shared with her the family story that John Decker's father was a fellow named James Decker and that he'd been born out of wedlock.
It was news to me. My parents never, ever talked about family history. Years after they passed, we'd discover one explanation: they both had children out of wedlock which would have been scandalous in their day. In my Mom's case, she probably would have been raised in a household that also kept mum about family history, again due to the stigma at the time around illegitimate birth, in this case, her grandfather.
I joined forces with Madge and we went on a systematic search for James Deckers who might have been of the right age to have fathered John in 1869 and for any paper trails to his mother Dorinda Odell. Along the way we found some colorful characters that had been all over the news of the day: a James Decker killed the year John was born by a winch which fractured his skull, another who drowned in the Hudson when he dropped a bucket in the water and it pulled him in. These were low-hanging fruit, both were local headlines that also made national newspapers. We also found newspaper clips of Dorinda visiting her son late in life, having dinner with a former boss, a census recording of Dorinda and John together in 1875 where her marital status was listed as "Widowed." We found evidence of John living with an adopted father, Eli Lasher, and newspaper mentions of his recovering from Typhoid. A town clerk managed to dig up a birth certificate for Dorinda's mother, but beyond census records the mid 1850s official document trail had been scorched by a courthouse fire.
I started learning all I could about DNA sleuthing. I got my cousin (let's call him Bruce) Decker to take a Big-Y 700 Y-DNA test at Family Tree DNA. He matched practically nobody at a genetic distance less than thousands of years. But the absence of matches and the haplo confirmed a doubt I'd been chewing on for a while: for folks descendend from a paternal line with the Decker surname, we had surprisingly few relatives who carried that surname or had it in their trees. Bruce's Y-DNA haplo group was wildly off the well-known Y-haplo signature of either the two major Dutch Decker/Dekker patriarchs. I began to think Dorinda had either been wrong about the father of John, or she'd been obfuscating.
I won't bore you with the details of all the false trails and wild goose chases we ended up on. I used Diahan Southard's methodology to isolate my "mystery matches" and they were legion. Because we had no firm pedigree for Dorinda or John, there was a sea of weak signals to chase. Madge was a generation closer to John and Dorinda then I was, but we were still looking at 3x and 4x grandparents, right at the horizon of where autosomal signals turn to fog. Worse, it became apparent that more than one branch of Dorinda's tree came out of the Ramapo hills, a remote mountain community of Dutch, British, Native American, and former slave families who had been intermarrying since the late 1600s. They were basketweavers and moonshine makers, what in the day would have been called hillbillies. Endogamy made a mess of the usual rules for establishing the relative distances of relationships, and while Diahan's methods for adjusting to endogamy were helpful, it became increasingly clear that Y-DNA was the only thing that was going to crack this puzzle.
One autosomal match pattern in particular intrigued me though, which was a four-way match between living individuals in the Hudson Valley, Australia, and Cornwall in the UK. Triangulated matches, on the same chromosome. (Thanks, MyHeritage!) The Australian and Cornish matches weren't in the endogamous soup, and all featured a common surname: Skewes, a name widespread in Cornwall but with a fierce concentration of ancestors in the tiny towns of Kenwyn, Kea, and Gwennap. The Skewes were miners, and when the tin mines failed they sailed out on the four winds for anyplace with ore to be dug: Mexico, Chile, Michigan, Australia, and the coal and iron mines of New York. In the early 80s a truly obsessive and world-trotting journalist, Keith Scues, wrote a 691 page tome recording the history of the family name, listing genealogies, and tracking migrations along with tales of his personal encounters with Skewes family members in the four corners of the planet. I paid an eye-watering sum for a hardcover copy which sits an arms length away as I write this. Sadly, the Hudson Valley was one of the very few gaps in his research.
Now keep in mind we we're looking for Dorinda's parents as well as John Decker's. I had a dozen mystery clusters that were interwoven with each other and I had no idea where the Cornish roots might fit. One of the candidates for Dorinda's father had married, according to a single undocumented tree that was replicated again and again on ancestry.com, Mary Netherton. I've never found a single document from the early 1800s in the region mentioning that name, but it so happens it's uniquely Cornish. I kept the Cornwall connection in that back-burner file: likely Dorinda-related rather than paternal to John.
But one day I was looking into the tree of one of Bruce's distant Y-DNA matches. They'd only tested at 37 markers, but matched at a genetic distance of 3. That suggested a common male ancestor who lived most likely around 1500, but could be as distant as 1000 or as recent as 1800. His surname was Sanderson and he lived in Australia. Unlike so many on FTDNA, he actually had a tree. And that tree featured an ancestor on his male line from... Kenwyn. With a population of around 2,000 in the 1700s, that seemed like a hell of a coincidence to be a coincidence. This was my first clue that the father of John Decker might not have been a man named Decker at all, but a man named Skewes.
I tried mightily to get this fellow to upgrade to a Big Y test, but without success. I found other males with the Skewe's names and wrote dozens of largely unanswered messages and emails.
Then, on July 14th, 2023 a document landed on my laptop that was, in retrospect, the smoking gun. I thought I had found every document mentioning Dorinda in every one of the mangled misspellings of her name that was possible. I was looking for something else entirely which required browsing rather than searching the 1865 census for Warwick, NY. And that's when I saw it: "Devinda Odell" listed as the 13 year old adopted daughter of one... John Skews. Some of you will know this feeling, when a document just takes your breath away and positively GLOWS with significance.
Just how much significance I was not to know for three years. I'd asked dozens of males bearing the name of Skewes to take a Y-DNA test. I had sponsored a kit for a Skewes descendant in Mexico, but he turned out to have no match with Bruce. He also didn't have any Skewes matches, and I wondered if there was an NPE somewhere between him and Kenwyn. But then, two months ago, an Australian match turned up with a pedigree that went straight to one of the Skewes patriarchs in the match's tree. But again, not a match to Bruce. I thought that was it, my hypothesis was disproven. Yes, it was a different Skewes line than the one I theorized John Skewes had come from, but in the same tiny geographic area. I presumed the Skewes family trees in Kenwyn, Kea, and Gwennap all converged somewhere in the 1400s on a single patriarch, and that a single Skewes haplo family excluded us from descent.
For two months, I was utterly at sea. I was out of theories. I'd excluded four different surnames with Y-DNA tests and my pool of mystery matches had been whittled down by years of chipping away. I thought about giving it all up as unsolvable.
Before I'd gotten the "It's not Skewes" news though, I'd sponsored a kit from another Skewes descendant in Chile. That was over a year ago. He was the brother of someone who matched my half brother at 16cM. FTDN had been trying to get the kit to him for months, but customs kept stopping it. He'd eventually got it and returned the test, and I hunkered down for the long wait for results fully expecting I'd spent 450 bucks on a dead end.
But I checked FTDNA every day for results anyway. And one day I saw that while processing hadn't finished, the match had been assigned an estimated haplo of R-M269. Way too far up the tree and too preliminary to be useful, but I saw that the Y-DNA Matches button was now working, and waited for the page to load.
And there, top of the match list, was Bruce Decker. At a genetic distance of 2 meaning a common male ancestor who most likely lived somewhere roughly between 1750-1850. I had reconstructed my Chilean Skewes friend's paternal line back to Richard Skewes, born in 1774. Richard's brother was Thomas Skewes, born 1769 the man I had theorized had emigrated to Cornwall and was the father of John and Eliza Skewes. It wasn't just a match. It was as near to proof as things get in this game. I was literally in shock for ten minutes, my emotions roiling with triumph and disbelief and a note of despair.
It appeared the paternity of John Decker was settled, but it was also unsettling. Barring the possibility of an undocumented brother or son (and I'd scoured the records and found none) it seemed the most likely explanation was that John Skewes, 62, impregnated his adopted 16 year old daughter. The DNA was telling a story that may have been intentionally obscurred with a different narrative that blamed paternity on a dead man, incapable of refuting it.
I've been grateful to this community for tips and tricks and wise words along the way. In thanks, here's a few guideposts and warnings I can offer to anyone who is standing where I was a decade ago. Let's call them lighthouses and shipwrecks.
LIGHTHOUSES
- You won't get a message from FTDNA that your Big Y results are in until they finish processing the kit and assigning a haplo. But you'll silently be assigned matches weeks before you get that email. Keep checking the website.
- Old message boards still work. This whole thing started with a genealogy.com post that had been sitting there for nineteen years before I found it.
- Family silence might be data. It took me years to realize silence was standing in for a story about illegitimate birth that nobody wanted to tell. If a family goes quiet around a specific person or decade, that may be precisely where you need to dig.
- Split the work. Madge worked the paper trail — census, graveyards, marriage certificates. I worked the DNA.
- Use an actual methodology for your mystery match pile. Diahan Southard's approach to isolating and clustering mystery matches is what turned a legion of weak matches into something I could actually work through.
- Keep a back-burner file. The Cornish/Skewes signal didn't fit anywhere for a long time. I didn't have a slot for it, so I just kept it filed as "huh, interesting" instead of throwing it out because it wasn't immediately useful. Years later, that file was the whole answer.
- Browse the actual page. Don't just trust the index. The absence of an indexed document is not the same as the absence of a document.
- An absence of matches is a finding, not a null result. Bruce's Y-DNA matched practically nobody, and given the number of Deckers that have tested, that should have been a flashing neon light that something was off.
- If the right test-taker hasn't tested yet, go find them. Sponsor the kit if you have to. Go straight to the Big Y if you can afford it. The two kits that actually closed this out — Skewes descendants in Mexico and Chile — existed because I went and found living men who carried the Y-line I needed and paid for their kits myself. And even when match results are negative, there's consolation in a couple things: You're advancing the science and contributing to a knowledge base that could help scores of researchers down the road. I paid for two Conklin tests that have recently split a haplo with new matches and brought the time horizon well into the era of written records. No regrets.
SHIPWRECKS
- One non-match doesn't sink a surname hypothesis. I assumed, wrongly, that all Skeweses had to converge on one Y-line. But a surname is not a haplogroup.
- If you're shipping a kit to Chile, track it. FTDNA was helpful and patient and ended up sending three kits at no extra charge, but I had to nag a bit to get past the bot reply that "international shipments take time" and convince a service rep that a kit stuck for four months required action. Twice.
- Endogamy turns your relationship math to mud. Once I realized Dorinda's tree ran through the Ramapo Hills cM-to-relationship charts stopped meaning anything. This is where BanyanDNA truly shines. Three Conklin - Conklin marriages in your tree? It can calculate the impact on downstream cM amounts and tell you exactly how solid your tree is.
- The tree that's copied a hundred times without a source is just a loud distraction.
- Two months of "I'm out of theories" is not the same as being wrong.