Genealogical oopsies

Genealogy is not necessarily my cup of tea.  But I have family members who slurp it right down, and recently one of them, in her researches, discovered a closet, opened the door and found a skeleton grinning back at her.

All my life, I've known people who have a passion for tracing family trees.  In my younger days, it struck me as a pursuit for the gloriously amateur historian: trudging through old cemeteries, paging through family bibles and scrapbooks, soliciting the not-always-reliable memories of elderly relatives while they still lived, and so on. 

It appears that at least two infusions of technology have transformed the musty hobby.  The first was the advent of ancestry.com and other sites of that ilk.  All of a sudden, census records, Ellis Island records and similar veins of genealogical gold were at the family sleuth's fingertips; and these programs have a knack for identifying descendants of ancestors' siblings and marriages.

(Quick aside: my father's father, from whom my surname has descended to me, immigrated to this country as a young boy.  His first name, as all of us in the family including him had always understood, was Alberic.  Here in America, that was shortened to "Brick".  Naturally, when one's name is Brick, one endures a good deal of ribbing, not all of it in good fun, so he always hated the name.  Shortly before his death, we consulted the Ellis Island entrance records and discovered that his given name was not Alberic, but John.  He was crushed; he could have had the name John his entire life.  How he ended up as Alberic and Brick is a mystery which I believe the family historians may never solve).

The second transformation occurred when genetic tests from 23andMe and similar outfits made it inexpensive and convenient to obtain one's genetic profile and share it on the genealogy sites.  As the genetic profiles have accumulated, the genealogy sites are able to find all sorts of connections with distant relatives about whom one has never previously heard.  I have a sister who spends a good deal of her spare time reaching out to contemporaries who, according to the ancestry sites, are third cousins nine times removed (not really an exaggeration) and having excited correspondences and web chats with them.

Well.  It turns out that these genetic profiles not only find heretofore unsuspected connections, they also are adept at finding, er, un-connections.  And one of the latter appeared on one of the main branches of my family tree.  In what follows, I'm going to use real names, because I think it's sufficiently far back that nobody should really care anymore.

So - my mother's mother's parents were Joe Baur and his wife Helen nee Posbyhala, from somewhere in central Wisconsin.  While my mother was growing up, she had noted the curiosity that her mother had blue eyes even though neither of her mother's parents did.  I know even less about recessive genes and their outward appearances than I do about the distinction between "who" and "whom", but as my mother describes it, it really shouldn't happen that the child of two parents with brown eyes should produce a child with blue eyes.  What's more, my mom's mom's siblings, who were numerous (there may have been nine or more) all had brown eyes.

My mother's childhood question remained unanswered for many decades, until my sister noticed something else recently: amid the droves and myriads of descendants of ancestors and relatives presented to her by the ancestry website services, there should have been many Baurs who were descendants of my great-grandfather's siblings, aunts and uncles and so forth, but there were hardly any.  According to the website, it seemed to be a dead branch on the family tree, but my mother, who has worked hard her entire life to maintain relationships with cousins both near and distant and still has a fine working knowledge of her family, assured my sister that, no, there were many descendants of Baur cousins still alive and kicking.

My sister also noticed, on the genealogy sites, the appearance of a branch of the family of whom neither she nor my mother had previously heard: the Ubelechers.  Nobody that my sister asked could explain how the Ubelechers were related to us; according to virtually everyone, they're not related to us at all.  Yet the genetics say otherwise.

Recently my sister ran across an ancient high school yearbook from the tiny town in Wisconsin from which my mom's mom's parents hailed.  And there was a young Ubelecher man in that school, if not in their very class, then within a year or two.  My sister showed my mother the picture.  And my mother was thunderstruck: she thought the young man looked exactly like her mom, herself, her brother, a couple of her brother's children, and some of her own children (perhaps including me, although my eyes are brown).

The reasonable if tentative conclusion seems to be that the young man in the yearbook, or perhaps another Ubelecher, fathered my mother's mother by way of my great-grandmother.  Did they have a moment of passion?  A torrid affair?  Was she raped?  Was my great-grandfather aware?  Nobody knows.  All the principals went to heaven long ago.  My sister would be perfectly willing to reach out to some present-day Ubelechers, but she tells me that all of them have tagged themselves on the ancestry program as not wishing to be contacted by other enthusiasts.

I admit I don't make much of all this.  Whatever happened that long ago, happened.  My generation, and the generations that have come after, are pretty worldly about these things.  I don't remember off-hand how many children are born out of wedlock these days, but it's pretty high.  I don't think my grandmother's birth was exactly out of wedlock, although it was pretty darn early after her putative-parents' wedding (maybe too early), so my mother is telling herself and the rest of us that her grandfather, Joe Baur, may have had more than a little of St. Joseph about him.

For my mother, this is kind of a big deal.  Of course, she knew my great-grandmother a good deal better than I did; she can't help wondering if her grandmother kept a secret from her all these years.  And it's more than a little shocking to her that the man she grew up calling "Grandpa" may not have been her Grandpa at all.  Plus, she still carries a bit of pre-Vatican-II baggage with her, and the idea that her mom might have been whatever the female equivalent of a bastard used to be called, is something she can't quite let go of.