DNA Surprises, or how we found out we sit on a throne of lies.

In June of 2009, my oldest brother took a Y-DNA test from Family Tree DNA. After years of battling some pretty hefty genealogical brick walls, we figured it couldn't hurt to get the paternal test done to see if it could shed any light on our family's history.

We just couldn't seem to connect the dots on my father's father's side. We knew that my Great Great Grandfather, Henry Gleason Ward, was the son of one William C. Ward and Mary Wallace Ward. We had no marriage record for the parents, but we had a record for William C. Ward, a non-resident sailor, from the Savannah Poor House and Hospital stating he was buried on September 3, 1841, that he was born in Massachusetts 36 years prior, and had died of fever.

 We had some scattered records for Mary Wallace Ward in Savannah, but not much. We knew Mary Wallace had been born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1816 and that she had died in Savannah in 1859.

Photo: Courtesy of the late, great Jane Beacham. Thanks for everything, Jane.

We knew she was a nurse, and died of Intermittent Fever after a six day illness.

Other than these few things, we really didn't know much about Mary Wallace and William Ward. We didn't even know for certain where William was buried. We did know that sometime after Henry Gleason Ward was born in Charleston on 30 October 1836, the family had moved to Savannah, where his only sibling Julia Ward was born on 4 June 1841. Just three months later, William Ward would die in the Poor House/Sailors' Hospital. Mary would live 18 more years, long enough to marry Nicholas Handle in 1849. In the 1850 Census, Nicholas, Mary, Henry and Julia Ward are living in Savannah. So far we are unable to find a divorce record for Mary and Nicholas, but three months before Mary died in 1859, Nicholas married a Lucy Bennett.

What happened to Mary Wallace's Charleston family is unknown. The true birthplace of William C Ward is unknown. Julia's 1923 death certificate records her father's birthplace as England. The 1910 Census records it as Connecticut. The marriage record of Mary and William cannot be found.

This leads us to August of 2009. My brother's Y-DNA test results had come back, and just like we'd hoped, the brick walls started to fall. Just not in the way we could have ever imagined.

A little bit about Y-DNA.

In males, the Y chromosome is one half of his 23rd chromosome pair. Females inherit an X chromosome from their mother and an X chromosome from their father, but males inherit an X from their mother and a Y from their father. Having a Y chromosome is what makes a person genetically male. Naturally, only males can take a Y-DNA test.

The Y chromosome is unique in that it is passed down the paternal line from father to son to son to son to son virtually unchanged over thousands of years. Very infrequently, changes do happen. These changes are called mutations. Once a son's Y is passed down with a mutation which his father's Y did not have, the mutated version will be passed down son to son to son to son. Because of this, we can see with incredible accuracy when and where mutations occur.

A Y-DNA test is sometimes called a "Surname Test." Typically, males do not change their surnames as women do, so if your Y-DNA test shows that most of your matches are named "Springsteen", then that's the surname almost every man who passed your Y chromosome down the line would have used since the start of passed-down surnames.

Almost every man.

Adoptions happen. Affairs happen. Kidnappings happen. Daddy-haters who change their names happen. But by and large, surnames generally remain the same or very similar for generations.

When my brother's Y-DNA results came in, the results were immediate and unquestionable. The Y chromosome which my brother had gotten from our father and he'd gotten from his father and he'd gotten from his father belonged to the line of men who for hundreds and hundreds of years had been using the surname Gleason, not Ward. We had 32 Y-DNA matches for the basic 37-marker test we initially bought.  Only 4 had names which were not Gleason or a close variant. When we upgraded and had 67 markers tested, only 2 of 11 matches had surnames that were not Gleason.

Of course, having gotten this earth-shattering new information, we immediately turned our attention to finding our mysterious Gleason ancestor and figuring out how Henry Gleason Ward ended up in the care of Mary Wallace Ward. We ordered more tests for more siblings and breathlessly awaited the results.

Not.

DNA results can be confusing. Let's face it, none of us is begging to go back to 10th Grade Biology class. Sure, most of us remember something about a double helix and that mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, but frankly, it's been more than a few years since most of us have had to think about Deoxyribonucleic Acid. (Spelling it correctly was once a bonus question on one of my high school biology quizzes. I think you'll agree my Fernandina Beach High School education has paid off in spades.)

When you're expecting to see Ward all over a match page and see Gleason instead, you think you know what it means and you're pretty sure you should do something with that information, but you're not exactly sure what. By an extremely fortunate coincidence, the Gleason Surname Project on Family Tree DNA is the surname project to which all others aspire. The admins actively recruit anyone with the surname Gleason to test their DNA and add it to the database.

Almost immediately after our results showed we belonged to the Gleason Y DNA line, Judith Claasen, one of the admins, sent an email in which she very diplomatically noted that although our surname didn't match, it appeared we were Gleason descendants. She asked if we'd like to join the project, which we did. Emails were exchanged, and Judith's knowledge and willingness to help allowed us to make sense of our results. Another genealogist, Maud Gleason, went out of her way to help us, exchanging emails with Judith on our behalf, asking questions we didn't even know how to ask.

We Gleasons are not just devastatingly attractive. We're also incredibly helpful.


 

Right under our noses.

Not so very long ago, a mother's maiden name was almost always given to at least one child as a middle name. Sometimes, every last child would have his or her mother's maiden name as a middle name. This is a beautiful tradition and it's a shame it fell into disuse.

 I digress.

When we were looking for the family of Mary Wallace Ward, we naturally assumed that her son Henry Gleason Ward must have gotten the Gleason middle name from her side of the family. We knew she was from Charleston, so at some point long ago please don't ask me when  we were combing the Charleston records for any sign of Gleasons. Fortunately for us, there was really only one family of Gleasons in Charleston in the 1830s. 

Henry Buel Gleason was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1804. The Gleason family has been in Hartford for a long, long time. As in, they were already living in Hartford when Isaac Newton invented the telescope and Dom Perignon invented champagne. For reasons which aren't exactly clear, in the 1820s, Henry Buel Gleason left the Insurance Capital of the World and headed to the Holy City. There he established a crockery business and seemed to do quite well for himself. 

Elizabeth Paul Milnor was born in Easton, Pennsylvania in 1814 to George Higbee Milnor and his wife Mary Jones Glen. The Quaker Milnor family arrived in Pennsylvania in 1682 and didn't just plant themselves in the Keystone State - they didn't even move out of Bucks County until around 1800 when Joseph Kirkbride Milnor heard the siren song of Trenton, New Jersey and packed his bags. At some point, Joseph's son George, his daughter-in-law Mary, and his young granddaughter Elizabeth Paul Milnor moved to Charleston where Mrs. Milnor's family lived.  It was here that the paths of the Hartford Gleasons and the Bucks County Pennsylvania Milnors would finally cross.  In 1830, Henry and Elizabeth married. 

The Gleasons had daughter Mary in 1834, daughter Anna in 1837, daughter Sarah in 1840, son Francis in 1843, and son John in 1846. A family Bible records they had a few children who died at birth or in infancy, including one male child who died in October of 1836, the same exact month and year Henry Gleason Ward was born. 

Mary Wallace was living in Charleston in 1836 and working as a nurse. Little is known of her whereabouts, but in the 1840 Census a Mary Wallace is listed as a head of household, living with another woman and three male children under the age of five. If this is our Mary Wallace, she must have been taking in unwanted children, perhaps in an official capacity as a nurse. Another woman, Elizabeth Redfern, is living right next door to her at the same time, is head of household, and is caring for three girls and one boy. 

Sometime between the 1840 Census and June of 1841, Mary Wallace moved to Savannah, Georgia. On 4 June 1841, Henry Gleason Ward's sister Julia M. Ward was born in Savannah. 
Three months and one day later, William C. Ward, a 36-year old sailor from Massachusetts, or England, or Connecticut, died of fever in the Savannah Poor House and Sailors' Hospital. 

Death Ship.

Of the 41 people who died in Savannah, Georgia in September of 1841, at least 21 died of some sort of fever. One was brought in nearly dead, so we don't know what he died from, and a few more are listed as dying of things which are commonly known to be symptoms of various epidemic fevers. At least 29 were foreigners or merchants. Compared to months previous and following, it's pretty evident that a ship carrying dozens of (probably) yellow fever patients arrived in Savannah at the beginning of September. In the months before and after September, the majority of dead were residents of Savannah, as would be expected in any city's vital records. The causes of death range run the gamut of usual suspects for the time: dropsy, diarrhea, worms, and whooping cough.

Only September stands in stark contrast.

Eight men who died that month worked on ships. This doesn't seem like a huge number until you realize that only 16 of the dead had any occupation listed at all. All but two of those sailors were from the UK. (One was from Bremen, one from India.)

Yellow fever is spread by mosquitoes, not by human contact. Many of the residents who died that month died at home, as was the norm for the day. It wasn't dangerous to treat a yellow fever patient at your residence.

All things considered, it's fairly obvious that William C. Ward was a man who had nowhere else to go when he got sick. He almost certainly did not have a nurse-wife who lived in Savannah while he was a resident of somewhere else.

Did Mary Wallace treat William Ward while working in the Savannah Poor House Hospital? Perhaps she was under societal pressure to name a father of her children. Perhaps little Henry himself was asking his mother about his father, whom he did not know. Perhaps she needed to name a father in order to receive aid from a charity. I have to admit, a dead sailor would be a fantastic person to invent to be the father of your children.

Autosomal DNA

Naturally, when the thing genealogists and geneticists refer to as a Non-Paternal Event (NPE) happens, the most likely scenarios are either that an adoption or an affair has occurred. Kidnappings are rare, no matter what Lifetime Movies would have you believe.

For quite some time, we (mostly) believed that Henry Buel Gleason must have had an affair with Mary Wallace. It made no sense that Elizabeth Milnor Gleason would relinquish a child, no matter how sickly. Mary Wallace lived in Ward 1 of Charleston, which is adjacent and just a short stroll to Ward 3 where the Gleasons lived. Surely they could have come into contact. But how could we ever know?

Enter autosomal DNA.

I wrote about the Y chromosome being half of the man's 23rd chromosome, the half he gets from his father. The other half of his 23rd chromosome is the X he gets from his mother.  In women, half of the 23rd chromosome is an X she got from her father, and half is an X she got from her mother. The other 22 chromosomes in both men and women are called the autosomes, You might be able to deduce that an autosomal DNA test can detect DNA from both maternal and paternal lines.

I had an autosomal DNA test done by Ancestry in September of 2017. Once again, I got my results and wasn't quite sure what to do with them. I suppose I looked at some matches, saw the tons of cousins I matched with due to the inordinately large number of children my farmer ancestors had, and then I put everything on the back burner. I wasn't really interested in collateral cousins from certain sides. I know I'm from certain descent. Everyone in Florida is descended from half my great-great grandparents. They needed farmhands.

Recently we started looking into the Gleason dilemma again. I started playing around on Ancestry, and eventually I realized that I could enter a surname and search for DNA matches who also had that surname on their tree.

I texted my sister one morning and said, "I match with someone who descends from the Bucks County, Pennsylvania Milnor line." She texted back, "What does that mean?" I texted, "It means that we have evidence that we are descended from Henry Gleason AND Elizabeth Milnor."

After a few days of searching my matches, I realized I didn't just match with Milnors. I matched with Higbees and Glens and Joneses, all Elizabeth Milnor's ancestral line.

I still don't know why Elizabeth gave her child away. In 1836, childbirth was a deadly serious matter. Unlike Kate Middleton, who was showing off her baby hours after bringing him into the world, 1800s mothers would often be confined to bed for days, sometimes weeks. Hemorrhage and infection were real possibilities. It's entirely possible that Henry Gleason either didn't want the hassle or the heartbreak of another sick child, and when nurse Mary Wallace offered to take him home so that he die in peace, he agreed without Elizabeth knowing. It's also possible that Elizabeth did know and thought that having a nurse for a mother was her child's best chance for survival. We tend to see things through the lens of the 21st Century, but things were very different in the 19th Century.

There were no adoption records in South Carolina until the 1940s. There were no birth records. Census records until 1860 only listed head of household. Unless we find some wildly random proof of the Gleasons relinquishing their child, we'll have to rely on DNA, and trust the scientific evidence.