Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Analyzing a DNA Match ~ Who is the Common Ancestor

Once I decided that I should be able to determine the common ancestor (also known as the MRCA: Most Recent Common Ancestor) of my husband and Mr. K. (see previous post: Analyzing a DNA Match), I clicked on the envelope icon next to the name of the match and sent an email. In the email I noted that she and my husband had a match in common with the surname Seigle, and I provided my husband's Segal ancestry (which can be seen at Surname Saturday ~ Segal of Ukraine and New Jersey).

H.K. initially replied to my email noting that she had relatives in Wildwood (New Jersey, where Simche Segal died) and a few days later, she emailed again, while at a family barbecue, and was able to tell me that Lena Segal was her great grandmother on her father's side. She also mentioned her grandmother's maiden name as Sylvia Dlugatch.

I then replied to H.K. the following:
Aha! This confirms a theory that I had worked on a couple of years ago. Lena Segal was the daughter of Simche Segal and his second wife, Rebecca (Blume) Katz. It appears that you and my husband are third cousins and your father and my mother-in-law are second cousins.
I find that a family tree diagram helps place distant family members' relationships.


My theory came from finding Lena (Segal) Dlugatch enumerated twice in the 1910 U.S. Census, which confused me and made me unsure if I had the right person.

1910 U.S. census, Cape May County, New Jersey, population schedule, Holly Beach, enumeration district (ED) 90, sheet 5B, dwelling 23, family 25, Lena Segal (in household with Samuel Segal); image, Ancestry.com (https://www.ancestry.com: accessed 4 September 2011); citing NARA microfilm publication T624, roll T624_870.
According to this record, which was taken on 15 April 1910 (as of 1 April 1910), Lena Segal was in Holly Beach, New Jersey, listed as the daughter of the head of household, Samuel Segal. Her presumed mother, Rebecca, had been married to Samuel for 20 years and had three children, all of whom were living.

Lena Segal, age 19, was listed as married (M1 indicates her first marriage), had been married for 1 year, and had one child who was living. Also in the household were her two younger brothers, Louis (Lewis) and Isereal (Edward).

1910 U.S. census, Kings County, New Jersey, population schedule, Brooklyn, enumeration district (ED) 348, sheet 9A, dwelling 161, family 165, Lena Dlugatch (in household with Louis Dlugatch); image, Ancestry.com (https://www.ancestry.com: accessed 19 September 2017); citing NARA microfilm publication T624, roll T624_965.
According to this record, which was taken on 21 April 1910, Lena Dlugatch was wife of the head of household, Louis Dlugatch. The column for years of marriage was left blank, but she did have M1 indicating her first marriage. The next two columns indicated she was the mother of one child and he was living. In fact, he was listed below as Isidor Dlugatch, age 3/12, suggesting a birth date in January 1910. (The census date was 1 April 1910.)

There's got to be a story here... Why was Lena enumerated with her husband and very young son in Brooklyn but also with her parents in southern New Jersey under her maiden name, with her entry acknowledging that she was married and a mother?

When I asked my mother-in-law about this half sister of her grandmother, all she could remember about Lena was that she may have been the black sheep of the family and that's why she moved to New York. My mother-in-law thinks that perhaps Blume (Rebecca) liked her sons better. Of course, this is the perception of someone remembering stories from her childhood, and they were obviously one-sided. I'm hoping my husband's DNA match might find out about the other side of the story - Lena's side.

9 comments:

  1. Following your logic helps me think through some complex potential relationships in the DNA matches I've been trying to investigate. TY!

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    1. Marian, glad this helps. I find that the biggest issue for me is having my matches reply to my email message.

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  2. Is it also possible that Lena was visiting the family in NJ the day the enumerator showed up? Often people were asked who slept in the house last night, or something like that, so maybe the person providing the answers included Lena? I also cannot decipher the symbol that appears after Lena's name, and I wonder if that has any significance??

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    1. Amy, I wonder if that symbol indicates that Lena was not living at home at the time? Her son was just a few months old, so it doesn't make sense to me that she traveled to NJ. There must be an interesting story there.
      And yes, I have found several people enumerated more than once due to being in different places during the period of time a census was taken. In fact, Golda (Segal) Levitt was enumerated twice in 1940.

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    2. Yep, me, too. The census is hardly a fool-proof count of our country's population.

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  3. Elizabeth, I have a New Jersey immigrant relative that was counted twice in the same year in the 1930 Paterson, Passaic, New Jersey but different EDs.Actually, I have "doubles" of a few relatives in the NJ censuses ( 1910, 1920, 1930 ). The thing they all share in common was speaking two languages or only speaking their native language. My theory, at least in my family, is the when the census taker is "out", a child of the immigrant parents are worried that the parents may not understand the questions so they physically show up to help them. Another theory I have is that the parents included all their children, resident or non-resident, in the "count" of their family members. Perhaps it's a communication problem with the census enumerator and the people he counts when he visits.

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    1. I agree with your theory that it could be a communication problem, but it can also be when during the census-taking period the census taker came and how accurate he or she was in providing instructions (i.e. residents as of April 1).
      Thanks for the comment.

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  4. We have just discovered this year, 2018, that my husband is related to Lewis & Lena Dlugatch, his great grandparents. We have connected recently to the Dlugatch side and know nothing about Lena Seigal.

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    1. Marguerite, please contact me at elizhandler @ gmail.com and let me know how you're related. I have lots of information about the Seigal / Segal family.

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