52 Ancestors Week 23: So Many Descendants

 From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 23

The theme for Week 23 is "So Many Descendants." Sometimes when we're researching, we'll come across a set of ancestors who seem to have a gajillion descendants. Who is that in your family tree?

And that's just on WIKITREE!

    One of the biggest lessons I've learned on my genealogical adventure was that the further back in time you go, the more people share the same ancestors as you do depending on their family trees and everything. Take my 4th great-grandparents, Jean Baptiste Bibeau and Therese Laroche for example. As you can see from this week's banner, they had many descendants and over one hundred of them are DNA matches for my mother and ninety-seven people match yours truly. There are so many descendants that there's even a Facebook group dedicated to this family. With such a stagger number of matches, how do you deal with all these people?

Proceed along the highlighted
route.

    First off, you don't want to panic. Everyone likely has a large family who had a ton of kids and their kids had a ton of kids and so on and so on somewhere in their family tree. It's just how life was many years ago. In my case, one child of Jean Baptiste and Therese made her way to Haverhill, Mass with her husband Pierre Cadran in the early 1900s. Her name was Marie Eulalie and explaining that to the DNA matches has been nothing short of interesting because most of her siblings ended up in Minnesota as I explained in a previous blog.

    There's nothing wrong with the land of a thousand lakes. I just feel so awkward trying to explain to DNA matches that I descend from the one lady who decided to put down roots in the Merrimack Valley. I still wonder if they kept in touch via telegram or letters. That would be so cool and you know I would love to see them. I just hope that some form of correspondence is out there....somewhere. Call it wishful thinking if you want. I'm just being cautiously optimistic.

    

    Optimism aside, I still have hundreds of people to put into the tree. Do I add them all? Are they all legit paths? Well, thankfully the Thrulines for Jean Baptiste and his wife have been proven to be largely accurate due to the trifecta of awesome that is Minnesota's civil records, Quebec's civil records and my own records from the Bay State. I've been very lucky in that my Thrulines experience has been pretty good. Other people haven't been so lucky. One person's grandfather somehow became their uncle. How did that happen?! Oh, right. Other peoples' trees. That's where the data comes from!

    To make things a little easier on myself, I started adding DNA matches based on where I had the largest number of matches. I wanted to get the big groups out of the way because they would likely have the most information readily available to me. The rest would have to wait for another day.

    With that in mind, I began with Eulalie's siblings, Henriette and Leandre. They both had VERY large families of their own. Henriette had eleven children and Leandre had eight. The matches who descended from Henriette was the bigger of the two groups. So, I decided to work on her family first.

    Going into this, I knew it was going to be a tremendous undertaking. These families were huge and there was going to be a lot of great information about them everywhere. You honestly could make a descendency study about this group. I guess that's why there's a Facebook page about them.

A, Morrisette is not Alanis. I've checked.
Though, I probably AM related to her somehow.

    Henriette married a man named Jean Baptiste Morrissette when my third great-grandmother was just seven years old. Together, they had eleven children and though I have matches who descend from most of them, their daughters Angelique and Zoe had the most at five a piece.

    For now let's follow Zoe's path. Zoe married a man named Remigius Capistant in 1861 and as you might have guessed, THEY had a ton of children as well. Whoever said family history was easy never worked on a French-Canadian family tree. At least at this point I was still in Minnesota and still one step closer to my connection to the DNA matches.

    Zoe's children, Eugenie and Genevieve have two and three matches who descend from them respectively. From there I went down the line and confirmed everything until I reached the DNA matches themselves who turned out to be my 5th cousins AND my mom's 4th cousins once removed. Not bad, right?

    The question you have to ask is.....Am I crazy enough to add in ALL one hundred plus DNA matches who descend from my 4th great-grandparents to the tree. I think we all know the answer to that one. It's pretty clear looking at the screencaps of the Thrulines that I've already began the exhaustive work of adding all these DNA matches. I keep telling myself that this research will all be worth it and yet I'm still buried in tons and tons of hints from Minnesota.

   Surprisingly, several of the other descendants of Jean Baptiste and Therese are moderately close matches to my mother like the one you're seeing here. I wonder if this could be due to the fact that Charles was five years older than Marie Eulalie and was married by 1857. He and his wife, Maris Jeanne Vadnais had twelve children between 1860 and 1883.

    They had children who may have been closer in age to my second great-grandmother and her siblings. With the oldest born in 1860, that's a distinct possibility. I'm not sure if age really plays a role here. It's all a matter of when they had children and when their children had children and so on. 

    Some descendants are bound to be closer relations than others and that's just how things go when you work on a family tree. It's just that "YO" appears to shared the greatest amount of centimorgans with my mother out of all the Bibeau descendants.

    The Bibeau line is just one of many families where there seem to be a lot of descendants and these are just DNA matches. Imagine how many people are connected to me just by the paper trail alone? It's amazing to think about, isn't it. Like I said at the start of the blog, the further back in time you go, the more ancestors you'll likely share. That's why when people say "This is my tree" it vexes me a little. You don't own your ancestors. We're all conneccted in one way or another and as a genealogist it's your job to figure out how the pieces in the puzzle fit together!

    Now, will I continue researching the descendants of Jean Baptiste Bibeau and Therese La Roche? Why not? I want to have an accurate family tree and there are so many stories out there. Some are great. Some are sad. In the end they're all connected to me and will get a spot on the tree as long as there are sources backing them up. I welcome all cousins be they DNA matches or connected via paper trail. 

    Researching every descendant of a an ancestor can be a challenge. There's no doubt about that. As long as you remain dedicated and confident in your research, it shouldn't be that daunting. Just focus on the facts and if all else fails contact the people who are also researching the same ancestors as you. You never know who else is working on them. If you work together, there's nothing you can't accomplish!

See ya next time!

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