DNA Chips Away at the Joseph Henry Lowe Wall

When I received my DNA results, I went straight to my matches (after a brief stop at ethnicity). In an ideal world, I’d have hundreds of matches comprised of close relatives who all have fabulous family trees going back to the 1500s (with comprehensive sources and notes, of course).

In the real world, I had only 102 matches who were 4th cousins or closer. Of those, only about 20 had full trees linked to their DNA. A few more had trees that weren’t linked or trees that were private (which means I had no idea how large their trees were).

Click image to enlarge.

I scanned the list and recognized a few 1st cousins immediately. I then started browsing the available trees and Thrulines trying to identify how we were related. Since my research priority was to reveal the parents of my great grandfather, Joseph Henry Lowe, I was looking for trees with people named Lowe. I found only one. I sent the match who owned the tree a message introducing myself and explaining that my great-grandfather was named Joseph Henry Lowe born around 1850. She told me we must be related through Henry Lowe & Bridget Fox, who must have been my Joseph Henry Lowe’s parents. She was the descendant of one of Henry & Bridget's daughters, who she insisted must be Joseph Henry's sister.

Could it be that easy? Could I have found Joseph Henry’s family? Had DNA come through for me as I had hoped?

Henry Lowe had been a private in the 3rd Dragoon Guards when he married Bridget Fox in 1846 in Dublin, Ireland. I know from research that the 3rd Dragoon Guards was stationed around England, Ireland and Scotland in the mid-1800s, essentially for peace keeping and policing. Why did I know this? Because my Joseph Henry Lowe had been a private in the 3rd Dragoon Guards when he married in 1875. Both having served in the same regiment was certainly a strong indicator that Henry Lowe might be the father of Joseph Henry Lowe. Excited, I added Henry Lowe & Bridget Fox to my family tree as Joseph Henry's parents.

Then I started researching to confirm the information. I discovered pretty quickly that I had eliminated the family of Henry Lowe & Bridget Fox five years earlier. I could find records for only two children born to the couple, both in Dublin, but one of them was named Joseph and was born in 1862. My Joseph Henry had been born closer to 1850, so that Joseph wasn’t him. If my Joseph Henry had been born in 1862, he’d have been only 13 years old when he married in 1875. And it was unlikely that a couple would have two children with the same name unless the first one died young. Since Joseph Henry lived until 1919 and had more than a dozen children, he certainly did not die young. Joseph Henry also showed he'd been born in Bury Lancashire not Ireland. This had been the reason for the elimination of Henry Lowe & Bridget Fox.

I wasn’t sure how exactly I was related to that DNA cousin, but I was pretty sure Henry & Bridget were not Joseph Henry’s parents.

Discouraged and disappointed, I decided I’d need to remove Henry Lowe & Bridget Fox from my tree.

But before I got around to doing that, I got a message from another DNA match. She had been further down my match list and had a tree that was private, so I’d ignored her for the time being. But when I added Henry Lowe & Bridget Fox to my tree, the database created a Thruline to them in her tree. The next time she logged in, she was notified of a new DNA match, and when she checked her Thrulines, she found that her new match’s tree had a Henry Lowe & Bridget Fox that matched Henry Lowe & Bridget Fox in her tree.

So here was a second DNA match claiming ancestry from that same couple. Could they both been mistaken or...

Top photo courtesy of Unsplash.com