Lost burials: How many are there?

Lost burials: How many are there?

Finding the grave marker of an ancestor is always a great moment. These stones are as close as we can get to our distant forebears. Once found, the monument may even include previously unknown information, although their significance goes well beyond practical research considerations.

Despite this, it is common for cemeteries to be poorly cared for. In the north, winter freezes, and then spring thaws the ground, and stones easily topple and become submerged. In North America, the written historical period starts at various times in specific places, depending on settlement by writing cultures. And even then, there was often no economic possibility of memorializing the dead when the living were hard pressed to survive, or did not yet have access to stones and stone carvers. All communities have unmarked burials, even from the recent past, as well as entire lost burying grounds waiting to be rediscovered under fields, parking lots, and woodlots.

I was curious about how many burial locations in my areas of interest are unaccounted for. How many grave locations could still be recovered after a bit of research and analysis?

How many gravestones could be hiding under the turf or forest floor?

Fortunately, Statistics Canada (StatsCan) has population information for the province of Ontario going back to the 1820s. Crucial tables provide population totals by county for some of the 1820s and the 1830s.

I used these tables to identify that the population of Prince Edward County, Ontario, Canada (PEC) in 1824 was 8132 people. The population increased between 2% and 6% per year (with one decline of 2% in 1829) up to 1839. I used a conservative 2% average growth rate to reverse-engineer that the population of the county was about 5000 people in 1800 (perhaps 4500 in 1795), although this estimate may need to be adjusted to account for the actual arrival dates of various pioneer settlers in the 1790-1810 period. 

The next question is what is a reasonable estimate of mortality (the deaths per year) for the county community? Modern mortality in the province of Ontario is 7.4 people per thousand (0.74%) but these were hard times in a frontier community and the era in question also included one war, at least one cholera outbreak, and a rebellion. 

One estimate of mortality in the non-urban U.S. colonial communities many of these early county residents came from, is 20-25 people per thousand (or 2.25% on average) and this seems a much more likely scenario for what was happening in PEC. Adding up the yearly mortality under the modern rate gives an optimistic estimated mortality of only 2500 deaths in the 1795-1839 period. Doing the same with the more realistic 2.25% rate yields an estimate of almost 8000. 

Knowing these mortality figures, I was curious about the number of surviving and documented gravestones for people who died in PEC between 1795 (the earliest death date on a surviving stone) and 1839. Based on my experience researching the area, it did not seem likely thousands of graves dating to this early period are still standing and recorded.

Fortunately, there is a website, cemsearch.ca, which includes data collected from transcriptions of area cemeteries. These transcriptions were prepared by volunteers reviewing visible stones starting in the 1960s. Before the Internet, such transcriptions were published primarily by the Ontario Genealogical Society. Cemsearch is set up to enable partial string searching on death year, so I was able to pull out all the PEC records for people who died from the 1790s to the 1830s.

Once I completed that process, I had identified 306 known burials. Therefore, the survival rate for marked graves in the early period is no more than 10%, and much more likely to be a meagre 4%. 

At least 95% of burials in this period, in this county, are lost.

While identifying 2200-7500 lost graves may seem a gargantuan task, I do not think it would be impossible...

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This kind of analysis is not possible without the contributions of many others. Especially CemSearch Project Leader and Coordinator, Ron Smith, and the CemSearch data entry volunteers. And, all the monument transcriptions prepared over the last half-century by: Susan Bergeron, Stan Broadbridge, Lily Corson, Hugh Heal, Peter Johnson, Lori King, Mrs E. Lindsay, Carmen Montgomery, Josephine O'Coin, Stan Terry, Amy Vader, C. Loral R. Wanamaker, Mildred Parliament Wanamaker, and Ray Waterhouse.

Pedigree Books now available

Pedigree Books now available!

Practical, economical, and beautiful bound paperback and hardcover books are now available for purchase on Amazon.com, .uk, .ca, .au, .de, .fr, .es, .it.   These notebooks incorporate the horizontal pedigree charting tool posted to this blog in 2015 (now in a 8.5 x 11", 6-generation format). Designed to ensure key information about ancestors can be passed down in a stable, clear, format to descendants. These 108 to 110 page volumes easily accommodate very old lineages back to early historical periods from around the world. Recommended for documenting burial locations of ancestors, color-coding birth and death locations, documenting mtDNA and Y DNA lines, ancestral occupations, health conditions, etc. Handy field research book to keep in the car.

LOOK INSIDE to see the 99 Charts plus Notes Pedigree Book format

Also available in a 53 Charts (single-sided pages) Pedigree Book format

The Girl in the Library

I've joined the club of genealogists who write mystery novels! This one is pretty 'cozy' and I hope it will appeal to everybody who likes golden age detective fiction as well as true crime. There are three libraries and a cemetery, time on a microfilm reader, and several dogs. Hope you check it out on Amazon (free preview available in most markets and free download via Kindle Unlimited; .co.uk, .com). UPDATE: Amazon Prime members can read for free (in Amazon Prime Reading) from June 1st until November 30th, 2023.

Genealogy Community Service: Breaking Brick Walls for Strangers

It is the end of an intractable year and this post is in the spirit of seasonal giving; no matter how stuck we get on our own family, we are all in a position to help others. Despite everything, 2020 had a few highlights for me, and unsurprisingly, almost all of them involved breaking down genealogical brick walls. However, only one brick wall was among my own ancestors (thank you to the National Archives UK for free downloads!). The others were cases where I came across the magical tidbit of evidence that broke through to further generations or specific origin locations for the ancestors of strangers.

In one case I was helping a fourth cousin by reading through NY land records and I came across a well described family group, with sons-in-law listed, in a very small town in frontier NY state in the early 1800s. I checked google and FamilySearch and discovered that one of the daughters was the most distant point on a FamilySearch one tree lineage. She had died in the midwest, birth location New York state, and her parents and hometown were unknown. The will I was looking at in a county land registration book proved who her parents and siblings were as well as her town of origin. I updated her profile on FamilySearch, adding the other relatives, and linking to the documentation.

In the same way a document with a detailed family group (particularly including in-laws) can link up people currently stranded on the tree without specific origin information, researching cemetery plots often reconstructs more complete family groups (a better and more distinctive entity to research than an individual) and thereby enables the research identifying their origins. In the best case scenarios a gravestone or cemetery registry includes birth location, even when all other records do not. I do comprehensive research for specific cemeteries on FindAGrave and many origin towns in England, Scotland, and Ireland were successfully identified and publicly posted on the FamilySearch one tree and FindAGrave this year. In one case someone submitted an edit request that did not look right, and in researching and checking what was going on, the US and English origins of two separate Ontario families was solved and posted for their descendants to see.

Inevitably, we come across evidence that is not relevant to our own trees but we may have dug up someone else's treasure. If you are reviewing an obscure or difficult to access source, keep an eye out for information that might break any brick wall; whenever a family group is described with any differentiating detail, it is good to search for them on the FamilySearch tree (https://www.familysearch.org/tree/find/name) and on FindAGrave and to add the information you have uncovered. For people not yet on the tree, it can take a few minutes of research to look for members of a more recent generation and then to build backwards, but it is worth doing. Some of my most positive genealogy interactions in this otherwise terrible year came about because of a few extra minutes of work here or there that made all the difference to another genealogy community member.

Best wishes for all in 2021!

DNA test your Irish-descended elders, before it is too late

Recently, a genealogist with a brick wall at an emigrant Irish ancestor born in the 1840s posted to a group seeking advice on getting documentation to reveal his specific origins. As usually happens, the ancestor had a very common Irish name and nothing in US records was particularly specific about where he came from. Given the general scarcity of documentation capable of resolving these situations, suggestions quickly turned to autosomal DNA testing. The original poster indicated she had heard of DNA testing, but was not sure about doing it herself.

Such reticence can eliminate, forever, the chance of breaking through brick-walls at this typical Irish emigrant timescale.

Realistically, autosomal DNA testing is the best tool for connecting an Irish immigrant to his or her origin family and townland back in Ireland, given the preponderance of common names in Ireland and the typical lack of specific birth locations on later-life records in many destination countries. And, for it to work, we really need to test the great-great grandchildren of those who were born in Ireland in the period just before and after the famine. Some of these 2x great-grandchildren are still with us.

There are technical and practical reasons for this.

For diaspora researchers, once census, marriage, death, and obituary record leads have dried up, what can work -- and work very well -- is discovering a second or third cousin match at one of the DNA testing companies who happens to have more information than you do.

Someone who matched at predicted third-cousin level to an Irish-descended elder in my family knew she had a line leading back to a Mary (with a very common Irish surname) who married a Patrick (with an even more common surname) both of Ireland, whose daughter came to NY. Mary and Patrick were born in the 1840s. Mary's surname matched with an Irish line that we know a lot about -- one we are still in contact with back in the Old Country. Our family therefore has an unusual amount of knowledge well beyond what is recorded in expected documentation. We've also gone through parish records from the 1820s forward and plucked out the baptisms and marriages that we know from locations, dates, witnesses, and naming patterns belong to our family. Where possible, we have down-traced using records combined with the memories of elders about first and second cousins they met in passing as children in the 1930s, further filling in this tree.

Mary's name and surname, once given to me by the match, was of obvious immediate interest, and I checked my database and discovered we did indeed have a 2nd great aunt who had married a Patrick with the given surname. The resulting relationship was consistent with the DNA shared and it was clear we had figured out the Most Recent Common Ancestor within minutes. The match got to add three more generations and many cousins to her tree.  Mary and Patrick had married and moved away, and their children had gone even further, to upstate NY and then California, and so for us, this was really the only way to gain knowledge of what happened to her descendants.

Now, we were particularly lucky to have the two names of a couple to work with, and that Mary had married in her home parish (as expected) so that her husband's name was already in my database. While it would have been trickier, it still would have worked if we had only her name to go on. However, what likely would not have worked was if we waited to test the grandchild of either of the actual DNA testers. This is why:

Given that the probability the DNA tests can detect a cousin relationship drops off precipitously at the fourth cousin-level, waiting another generation or two is disastrous for solving these kinds of problems.

Additionally, looking at the estimated birth years in the above graphic, and taking into account the general history of Irish emigration (heavy starting in the mid 1800s) it is particularly important to test Irish diaspora descendants born in the 1920s and 1930s while we still can.

Once the elder generation has tested, it can take time for the autosomal DNA testing to bear fruit. For the first five years or so, I found it very slow going. However, so many more people are testing now, and some of them have good information, that we are generating results much more frequently and quickly. Once one Most Recent Common Ancestral couple is determined, that information becomes useful in figuring out potential relationships with other people who share that segment. And when people post the best trees that they can with their DNA testing profile, the linking can go like lightning.

The frustrating ambiguities inherent in researching immigrant ancestors who came from "Ireland" and often shared their name and birth year with many thousands of their countrymen persists. However, if one branch of the family happens to have knowledge going back 200 years and tests their descendants they can then help likely matches from other branches figure out how they fit in.

Large Irish families actually increase the odds of being able to sort it out (eventually) because all you need is for one branch to have remained relatively well established and documented. While all the other siblings may have dispersed around the world and to locales with next-to-useless documentation, if you can still test people in the needed senior generations, the match will show up and hopefully the pieces will then fit together. We found that good documentation happened with the eldest male branch which remained in Ireland, and then with the extended NY family that established itself in an around Brooklyn and still holds family reunions.

UPDATE, in the two years since this post was originally published in 2018, both of Catherine' and Margaret's descendants showed up on Ancestry and 23andme, filling in what happened to these branches and linking their descendants back into the family

If we can piece together the family groups that constituted the population of Ireland throughout the nineteenth century, we may then be able to take it back even further. If we do not test Irish descended elders born in the 1920s and 1930s while we still can, this possibility will evaporate.

UE Loyalist lineages: Now easy to research online for free! Part VII

The seventh in an eight part series to help people with potential UE Loyalist lines access the wealth of documentation available online for free, as well as offline sources that can provide further evidence linking generations.

Step 6: Search wills, obtain evidence linking generations

I'd hoped to expand my knowledge about wills across Canada, and retrieve more of them, while writing up this post, but the last few months did not unfold as planned. I do have extensive experience working with Ontario wills though, and have applied my training and experience as an archivist to identify will collections across the country. While I've personally used the Ontario and Saskatchewan probate files, I strongly suspect there are more will series out there than those identified below. So, this step is comprehensive but likely not complete at this time.

Hopefully, by the end of Steps 4 and 5, you have several UEL related names as well as place information.

Given that UELs were compensated with land (typically 200 acres), there is a strong tendency for property transfer records to exist for most of the individuals in the first three generations. Typically, there is a will for the UEL (unless they died very early), possibly his/her widow/er, their male children, sons-in-law, some daughters, and grandchildren, that either went through probate or was registered with a land transfer process at the municipal level.

Primogeniture was not the normal practice and therefore it is common for younger sons and daughters to be listed in the will. Depending on timing, the daughters may be referred to by their married names, either in the will or in the probate process documents, and this can prove a link between generations for those early 19th-century people whose baptism and marriage records have not survived.

Canadian wills and will indexes are not (yet, fingers crossed) generally available online. Quebec does not have a history of English Common law and therefore wills are handled differently there. Definitely check what is online first (if you are fortunate to have family from these jurisdictions within the given time span) as these are by far the easiest wills to access:

• Nova Scotia Probate Records, 1760-1993 (1,395,009 images, some indexes by county on reels)
• Saskatchewan, Probate Estate Files, 1887-1931 (1,903,391 images, database indexed)
• Manitoba Probate Records, 1871-1930 (802,992 images, indexed within the reels)
• British Columbia Estate Files, 1859-1949 (783,176 images, limited indexing)

The next most accessible wills are those which were handled by a centralized or regional probate or surrogate court and which have been indexed by name, allowing the will to then be ordered on microfilm. Unfortunately, only the following indexes have been posted online so far:

• Early New Brunswick Probate, 1785-1835 (database index of published abstracts)
• Ontario Probate Court Records - Surnames A to G (pre-1859)
• Ontario Probate Court Records - Surnames: H to N (pre-1859)
• Ontario Probate Court Records - Surnames: O to Z (pre-1859)
• If you find a person in the above Ontario Probate indexes, the Archives of Ontario website provides instructions for ordering microfilms via interlibrary loan; however, it may be easier to order the film to your local Family History Center from the following collections: Probate registers, 1793-1858; and estate files, 1793-1859; Probate minute book, 1795-1847; probate record books, 1789-1901; probate estate papers, 1858-1900; index, 1877-1953
• Ontario Surrogate Court Index 1793-1858
• In Ontario after 1859 you need to get access to the right index for the right county (and at the right time: the court clerk would use an indexing book until it was full, then start a new one, so the indexing is in unpredictable 10-20 year stretches, if it exists at all). In the 1980s June Gibson transcribed the indexes by county, sorted alphabetically by last name, up to 1900, and they were published by Generation Press. Many libraries have copies of these publications and they are much easier to use than the microfilmed index books, so if the will you need is post 1858 and pre-1901, start by searching library catalogues you can easily visit for "Surrogate Court index 1859-1900 June Gibson" (plus the county you need). The indexes are also still in print (both paper and e-edition) and available from Global Genealogy, so you might find buying a copy is cost effective. Once you have the will number, you can figure out how to order the right Ontario Archives or FamilySearch microfilm that contains the actual probate or administration file.

There are also centralized or county court probates which are indexed and available on microfilm:

• Prince Edward Island. Probate Court. Probate records, 1807-1958; indexes, 1786-2000
• Ontario surrogate court indices going beyond 1900 are retrieved by using the county-specific finding aids for "Post-1859 to 1970" on the Ontario Archives website then figuring out how to get access to the right county index microfilm either through Ontario Archives or through FamilySearch. For FamilySearch, search the catalogue for the county of interest and then check what they have available under probate. For example, Prince Edward County has a testator index up to 1947 available on one film. The availability and means of indexing by the clerk is highly variable by county and you won't always find there is a good index, although the actual probate files are often available up to 1930 or so.

If you have not found someone in the above indexes, a will may still exist, but it is likely tied to some sort of localized land transfer process or was really only handled privately within the family. In which case you want to ask people with expertise about the locality or the family, if they know of any other will records. More than once I have searched for a will in the collection I expected it to be in, found nothing, then discovered by googling that someone else had an original private copy and had transcribed it to the internet!

Was John Holland the biological great-grandfather of Richard III?

Rumours have persisted for more than six hundred years that John Holland, Duke of Exeter, was the actual biological father of Richard of Conisburgh, who was legally the son of Edmund of Langley, Duke of York.

The recent archaeological investigation of the remains of Richard of Conisburgh's grandson, King Richard III, concluded the patrilineally inherited Y-DNA of the skeleton does not match that of putative male-line living relatives. Of the 18 birth events which could misrepresent paternity, the birth of Richard of Conisburgh, paternal grandfather of Richard III (and Edward IV), is strikingly suspect.

While rumours of non-paternity were a common slander serving political ends, there are, aside from the Y-DNA results, historically notable anomalies in Richard of Conisburgh's relationship with his legal father, Edmund of Langley, and his elder brother, Edward. Edmund of Langley left Richard of Conisburgh, ostensibly the second of only two sons, out of his will. Edward also ignored his brother as a potential heir.

Edmund of Langley remained married to Richard of Conisburgh's mother, Isabella of Castille, until she died aged 37 in 1392. However, in the seventeen years after Richard was born, while both Edmund and Isabella were believed to be healthy and fertile, there were no more children, strongly suggesting they were estranged.

It tends to be considered a historical fact that Isabella had an affair with John Holland (maternal half brother to King Richard II). In her will she left her estate to King Richard II and asked him to give her son Richard an annuity of 500 marks. This arrangement is not inconsistent with the possibility that Richard of Conisburgh was the King's half nephew, and she knew the King was more likely to protect the interests of her "favourite" son, perhaps even against interference from her estranged husband.

The Y DNA haplotype of Richard III's skeletal remains was identified as G-P287. Trying to investigate the Holland family using wikipedia, thepeerage.com and some google searching, it seems clear that no Y-carrying descendant of John Holland exists (his legitimate male line seems to have died out with his grandson, and of his three illegitimate sons the "Bastards of Exeter," I could find evidence only that one had an heiress).

The same is true for his brother, Thomas. However, intriguingly, there is an unsourced statement on the wikipedia page of his nephew, Edmund Holland, suggesting that Edmund's remains may have been recovered archaeologically on Île Lavrec, Île-de-Bréhat. In which case, if autosomal DNA can be recovered from both those remains and those of Richard III, they should be compared. If they are Edmund's remains (and assuming Richard III's biological father was Richard Plantagenet), there would be, at minimum, a second cousinship once removed between the remains. Richard III's father's maternal great-grandmother was Alianore Holland. However, if John Holland is the biological great-grandfather of Richard III, there would be an additional first cousin relationship (twice removed), leading to increased shared autosomal DNA, and the Y-DNA haplotype of Edmund's remains should be G-P287.

The only caveat is the possibility of another non-paternity event striking the five birth events between Edmund Holland and Richard III.

However, this mysterious Internet attestation that the remains of Edmund Holland may be in hand could also be misguided or false (I could find nothing definite about a Lavrec dig by googling, and the find may also be old and contaminated). If so, that would leave, as the next best option, testing the closest available male line descendants of John Holland's male line first cousins. And they do appear to be out there:

Obviously, over twenty-odd generations, the probability that some other paternity event in the line is not what it appears to be goes way up. It is possible John Holland himself was not even a Holland. However, that does not mean the investigation wouldn't be worthwhile. I've shown one descending branch in the Holland tree, approximately the most senior one, but there are several other offshoots. It is a very interesting family and people have been working for hundreds of years trying to figure out how some potential branches fit into the complete tree. By testing living descendants of branches that meet up farther and farther back (a triangulation technique that effectively worked to identify the Somerset Y type for several generations) the validity of the Y DNA inheritance can be demonstrated between certain points on the tree and branches can be slotted together.

Given that the Somerset lines did not match, researchers have apparently gone even farther back than Edward III trying to find Plantagenet Y DNA carriers many generations removed from Richard III, including through purported illegitimate early Plantagenet lines. Compared to that, working down from Robert de Holland may be a relatively pragmatic thing to try, even just for elimination. For all we know, the South African Hollands have already tested their Y DNA and identified their own haplotype (in which case, please let us know if it is or is not G-P287...)

I've been following the Richard III investigation for about two years now. For me, the last few months were not conducive to writing blogs (I expect to get back to my Loyalists blogs and some case studies shortly). As soon as the old blogging brain muscles had some energy though, this is the post they wanted to produce. On some level, what fascinates me about the Richard III Y DNA results is the possibility it may ultimately reveal something fundamental about animosities during the Wars of the Roses. A modern-day biological investigation really could unlock something important about major historical events from six hundred years ago.