QUESTION FOR ANCESTRY WORSHIP GENEALOGY
My mom, who was born in the 1930's, died a few years ago. I started doing the genealogy for her family. My four sisters and I got together and we all have remembered a different maiden name for mom. Three of the names begin with a the same letter.
I took a DNA test - maternal - and mom said she was Italian - but no Italian showed up on the test. Ukrainian, Polish, Slovak areas did.
Your advice, Please!
ANSWER
The situation isn't as uncommon as you may think. I suggest you proceed with standard research methods and see what comes up. Mom may not have known her own ancestry, she may have been adopted - and not been told, she could have been lied to or her own mother might have been. Or she could have been born with one name and her own mother might have remarried and her new husband adopted her.
1) Get a copy of her death certificate and/or burial and see what maiden name is mentioned.
2) Get a copy of her birth certificate and see what maiden name is listed.
3) Send away for her original application for Social Security which she probably applied for in the 1950's for her first job.
If the maiden name is consistent on these three, or appears with a slight variation, it's probably correct.
Consider the following: That the maiden name was pronounced in another language but could have been assumed to be spelled a certain way by the person who was writing it down. That a formal or informal surname change may have occurred. Run an Internet check on the surname and see if it comes up as clearly Italian or Ukrainian or what ethnicity it suggests. See if you can find one of those on-line translators that also has a voice that pronounces the word and think about how you'd spell that. Find the meaning of the name. Consider that the name might mean the same thing - or similar - but in different languages. Or changed to reflect a pronunciation that is "easier."
I've encountered the following: An S added to the ending of the name. A common name in Hungarian turned into the same meaning in English ie. Szabo is Tailor. The suffix of a name, such as ski, szke, son, dottar, removed from the name to make it shorter. Siblings with different surnames due to being half siblings - which they knew but descendants did not. Silent first letters of names eliminated in pronunciation. Surnames that are changed to eliminate confusion of multiple consonants.
4) Since she was born in the 1930's let's get her on the 1940 census and see if we can follow her parents or siblings back to the 1930's, 1920's, as far back as we can go. If the confusion continues, well, try to find her parent's marriage certificate. Did they marry in the Old Country or here? In the Old Country, their marriage may be in a church record rather than a civil registration.
Finally DNA is proving how nomadic or mobile humans have been and how much ethnicity and race are mixed. Quite possibly your mother's ancestors simply moved from a Central-Eastern European country to Italy and considered themselves culturally Italian.
I can't wait to hear what you learned!
Ancestry Worship Genealogy
07 July 2018
WHEN DID COUSINS STOP MARRYING IN YOUR FAMILY?
NEWSCIENTIST : STUDY ON COUSIN MARRIAGE
EXCERPT: Joanna Kaplanis at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, and her colleagues, collected 86 million publicly-available profiles from Geni.com. Users on this crowd sourcing website create family trees, which are then merged with others when matches occur.
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Basically, in the 19th century people started living further away from each other but cousin marriage persisted for about another 50 years.
Another article based on this same study by another publication, which I'm not linking to due to the ads, said that the tree goes back 11 generations, the participants (willing?) were 85% North American or European, and BEFORE 1750 the spouse was found within 6 miles. (So read those census records around town!) After 1950 the geographically desirable were within 60 miles. (Makes sense to me. You are now willing to drive an hour each way to date!) Before 1850 it was socially acceptable and common. 1800 to 1850 people traveled further but it was still OK. After that it became less acceptable to marry your cousin. But you'll have to read the study to know if they mean first cousin or fourth!
04 July 2018
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