A Question of Parentage Solved

Isabella Rochester Pickles

My grandmother on my father’s side, Isabella Rochester Pickles (known as Isabel or Belle), was born in March 1894. Her parents were married on 26 December 1893. You may have noticed that those dates are only three months apart.

Samuel Pickles with his wife Margaret Connell

For the first few years of research into my family history, this short time-frame escaped my notice, at least consciously. I had treated that period as a year and three months rather than the three months of reality. Whether this was due to a lack of attention or an actual mental block, I don’t know. I suspect the latter as when talking to relatives about our family history, I often could not recall either the year of Isabel’s birth (was it 1894 or 1895?) or the year of her parents’ marriage (was it 1892 or 1893?) or sometimes both.

During those early years I researched Isabel's father, Samuel Pickles, extensively. There were two reasons for this earnest. The first was that other great-grandfathers were dead-ends at the time. The second was that Samuel Pickles’ family had been clay tobacco pipe makers, which I found fascinating. I jumped into the world of pipe makers and followed the Pickles family back generation after generation with glee.

1861 census showing Samuel's pipe-making father (Samuel Luke, shown as Luke) and grandfather (David)

I remember the moment when the light went on about the deficiency of months between the marriage and birth, and it was a shock. I sat back in my chair and wondered how I had not noticed that before. What happened next was panic. What if Samuel was NOT Isabel’s biological father? I had done so much research on the Pickles family that losing them, biologically, would have been a crushing disappointment. I tried to tell myself that even if he wasn't Isabel's real father, he was still the only father she’d known and was the biological father of her siblings. But that wasn't enough.

I wanted to prove if he was or was not Isabel’s real father. I began to look at the evidence. Isabel’s mother, Margaret Connell, was of staunch Irish Catholic stock. Samuel Pickles was an English Anglican with no Catholics in his tree. If Margaret’s parents ‘married her off’ to avoid the shame of an unwed mother in the family, surely they’d have found an Irish Catholic boy rather than an English Protestant, right? And if that's what had happened, why had they waited until she was more than six months pregnant to find her a husband? Samuel had alternated between being a soldier and a coal miner, which means that he might have been away and unavailable to marry earlier in the pregnancy. The marriage taking place on Boxing Day could indicate that he’d come home for Christmas, so that may have been the first opportunity for them to marry after Margaret’s ‘condition’ was known. I breathed a tentative sigh of relief at the conclusions drawn and moved on. Or tried to. But the question sat in my subconscious, begging for a concrete answer.

When I finally had my DNA done, I went looking for that concrete answer. If Samuel were Isabel’s biological father, the children of her siblings would appear to me as full cousins of some sort. If Samuel was not her father, they would come up as half cousins or some other relation. The problem was, because my grandparents came to Canada, and the rest of the family stayed behind in England, I didn’t know anyone who fit that relationship. The cousins I knew personally were all descended from Isabel directly, so those matches would not help me. I needed someone who was not a direct descendant of Isabel.

Of course the easiest way to see how you are related to someone is to look at their family tree. So, I began combing through all my matches to check looking for someone who was related to Isabel’s siblings or to someone from earlier in my family tree on the Pickles line.

Sadly, most of my matches did not have trees on Ancestry, but imagine my relief when I found a person named Pickles in my match list -- and my joy seeing that the predicted relationship was 1st–2nd cousin and that we shared 386 cM across 21 segments of DNA. I don’t know all the ins and outs of centimorgans and segments, but I knew that this person was in the top few matches with lots of shared DNA. A little research and messaging helped me determine that the match was the daughter of Isabel’s sister. Whew!

Then I used Ancestry's Thulines to view 'shared ancestors.' The Thruline feature searches my matches to see if they have family trees attached to their DNA results. If they do, the algorithm looks in their trees for any ancestor who appears in my tree. Using Thrulines I found a 4th-6th cousin (identified as 3rd cousin 1x removed) with a tree containing David Pickles, Samuel’s grandfather. Whew again!

Thruline showing the connection between my tree and that of a DNA match
who was descended from my Samuel Pickles' grandfather, David Pickles.

More recently, I learned about Ancestry's 'match search' capability. I could search my DNA matches by a surname that appears in their trees. Typing 'Pickles' into the surname search field brought up 25 different matches, most of which were not known first cousins descended from Isabel. Viewing those trees I found almost all of these Pickles to be born earlier than Samuel. And I was able to connect those Pickles with my Pickles ancestors — confirmation of my blood relationship with Samuel Pickles and his parentage of Isabel. Whew, whew, whew!