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The Thumb's Christmas

  Our daughter, Anne, was a prolific artist when she was young. Our refrigerator door was full of her drawings, paintings, and school artwork. She liked to create little books, too, as she was also a natural storyteller. One Christmas when she was about eight years old, Anne wrote and illustrated a Christmas story for her little brother, James. If memory serves, she drew her inspiration from a book she had recently gotten from the library by illustrator Ed Emberley. He wrote and illustrated The Great Thumbprint Drawing Book . In it, Emberley showed how to make a variety of animals and people using a thumbprint as a starting point. The creations are simple and charming. It's amazing what you can do with a blog of ink and a few black lines. It's art that's accessible to anyone. Anne's story is called "The Thumb's Christmas," and is based on our family. There is a thumb with glasses (Anne), a thumb with little hair (toddler James), a thumb with a mustache (Ji...
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Discovering Belgian Origins


I'm participating in the 2024 "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks" writing Challenge - Week 2 Theme: Origins


One of the main pursuits of genealogy is to find out where we are from—the origins of our parents, grandparents, and those generations further back in time. 

I discovered a new ancestral origin as I looked through the St. Cecilia Catholic Church records from Sheldon, Wyoming, New York recently. This was the home church of several families in the mid-19th century, including my paternal grandmother's Baker, Schiltz, and Calteaux lines.

The record appears to be a parish census taken in the 1850s. I've heard from other researchers that it was taken about the time the second St. Cecilia's building was completed in 1847. (I'm working to get the front page translated from what I think is German to English, so stay tuned on that as it might shed more light on the volume's contents.)1

My understanding is that listed in order by column were: first, the parishioner; their parents; their siblings; what appears to be baptismal info with dates and locations. In the entry for "Peter Cailleteux" is the location of "Sampon, Luxem." Sampont is located in the southern Belgian province of Luxembourg in the Arlon region.2

Red line indicates "Sampon, Luxem." possibly a new ancestral origin.

If my interpretation is correct, Peter Cailleteux was the brother of Anna Maria (b. 1793), who married Peter Schiltz; the couple are my fourth great-grandparents:


I was curious to see if my DNA held any genetic evidence of this connection to Belgium. My AncestryDNA results show I carry about 1% of my total DNA from this region, noted as "Germanic Europe" in their ethnicity results. It's possible that this bit of DNA came down from the Cailleteux family to me.3

Brown-shaded area indicates the geographic region where my "Germanic Europe" DNA originated. The Cailleteux family had roots in Sampont, near Arlon.

According to Ancestry, "We estimate your ethnicity by comparing your DNA to DNA samples from groups of people whose families have lived for a long time in one place. For the Germanic Europe ethnicity region, we’ve collected samples from people whose families have lived in this area for generations. We use their samples to create a unique 'genetic fingerprint' for this ethnicity region that we compare your DNA sample to."4

While I'm just beginning to research these most distant family lines, it's fun to see this small piece of evidence to support a new ancestral origin.

Until next time...

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© Nancy Gilbride Casey, 2024. All rights reserved.

This post is a Friday Family History Find pick for 12 January 2024. Thanks, Linda!

 

IMAGE: Jean-Pol Grandmont, "Arlon," 12 June 2005; digital image, Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arlon_E2aJPG.jpg : 10 January 2024). This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

NOTES

1 St. Cecilia Catholic Church, Sheldon, Wyoming, New York, baptismal register, #1, including parish families register, np, entry 62, Peter Cailleteux; digital image, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CS4R-5922-P : 11 December 2023); citing St. Cecilia Parish, Sheldon, Wyoming, New York.

2 Nancy Gilbride Casey, "Wyoming County New York Genealogy," Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/279828887121735/user/1018471135 : 10 January 2023), posting, "Hello, I am looking at St. Cecilia church books...," 30 November 2023. Also: Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlon : 10 January 2024), "Arlon," last updated 6 January 2024, at 17:28 (UTC).

3 AncestryDNA (https://www.ancestry.com/dna/origins/D71DE6F3-5014-45AB-BEAD-3521D44F9F5C/polygon?ethnicity=07700 : 10 January 2024), "Origins" report for Nancy Gilbride Casey, last updated August 2023, reporting 1% Germanic Europe ethnicity. 

4 Ibid, "Germanic Europe" information.


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