The Big Power of Tiny DNA

I had chills, I had tears in my eyes, and my laughter escaped into the room. After a long, hard year researching every possible angle, it all came down to one tiny, tiny thing: DNA.

The DNA has finally connected two families: The family of Michael Gilbride and Catherine Ryan, with the family of Michael Gilbride and Mary Gallagher.

Michael is the common denominator, our great, great grandfather - the elusive one my Aunt Margaret had started looking for back in the 1980s. He had married Catherine Ryan at Holy Rosary Church on 2 Feb 1875 in Scranton. Aunt Margaret obtained that record copy in 1989.

Our research began here, with the extracted marriage record for Michael Gilbride and Catherine Ryan, Holy Rosary Catholic Church, Scranton, Pennsylvania.

But there, the trail quickly ran dry. Back in the days before the Internet, Ancestry and online records, Aunt Margaret had to mail her inquiries, or go to places where records were held, in order to look up documents on our Michael. Time after time, the answer came back to her, "We have no record."

And no wonder! The trail goes cold on Catherine after the birth of our great grandfather John Joseph Gilbride in 1876. She was institutionalized at Danville Asylum in Montour County, Pennsylvania, after losing a second child in March 1877. She died there in January 1881 of pneumonia, at age 26. (More on her incredible and sad story in another post.)

But what of Michael? Through a research inquiry to the Northeast Pennsylvania Genealogical Society last year, I obtained two items: A baptismal record for John Joseph, confirming the Michael and Catherine were his parents, and to my surprise, a second marriage record for a Michael to a Mary Gallagher, in 1885. Who was this woman?

Records on this Michael and Mary's family were relatively easy to come by: they appear in the 1900 U.S. census record together, on birth and death records for their children, and in cemetery records at Cathedral Cemetery. I was quickly able to figure out who their children were, where they lived, even who Mary married after Michael died in 1908, and forward in time.

But nagging in the back of my mind was the question: Was this Michael who married Mary in 1885, the same Michael who had married Catherine in 1875? Searches on records of the time in Scranton yielded several Michael Gilbrides. Which was which? Because Catherine died so young, there were very few records connecting her with our Michael. Record after record gave us circumstantial evidence that they were the same Michael, but nothing was the "smoking gun," as my cousin Tom called it, that linked the two Michaels definitively.

So, our research continued: we scoured Scranton city directories to establish households of all the many Gilbride individuals. We read over wills. We searched records at Cathedral Cemetery in Scranton where Michael was supposed to be buried. We got tantalizingly close several times to connection: Michael & John living in the same house in 1896; a Catherine listed in a cemetery ledger record next to a "Mr. Kilbride," in 1877. There were many other close but not definitive connections, until now.

I had taken a 23andMe DNA test a few years ago, mostly to confirm my heritage, which it did. I more recently uploaded the raw DNA to another website - GEDmatch.com, in an attempt to "cousin mine." It's the process by which you compare your DNA matches and their corresponding family trees to your own, to try to find common ancestors. The closest match I had turned out to be a second cousin; we share a common great grandfather in John Joseph Gilbride. Well, this proved the method worked! But no other matches had connected with Michael's other descendants to date.

My cousin Tom also decided to take a DNA test, but from Ancestry.com, and got his results back just the other day. Much like the GEDmatch site, Ancestry will show your DNA matches - and the matches' family trees. The trick is finding a shared ancestor among your matches - identifying descendants and then tracing back to the common family member.

And this is where the miracle happened: Tom was quickly able to find two DNA matches. Both of these matches were descended from Michael's siblings, and from James Gilbride and Bridget Egan - Michael's parents. Because we know for sure that the Michael who married Mary Gallagher is the son of James Gilbride & Bridget Egan, we have to be connected to them too, as our DNA matches their other children's descendants.

Here's a chart for those visual learners out there (best viewed on tablet or larger):

This confirms that the two Michael Gilbrides in our research are one and the same - our Michael.

That is the miracle of that tiny, tiny thing called DNA. It doesn't lie. The traces of our ancestors stay with us for some time, and can connect us to a larger family we might not have discovered otherwise.

As an added bonus: I recently made a connection with another researcher who is descended from the sibling of James Gilbride, above. So, I now also know the identities of my great, great, great, great grandparents:

James G. Gilbride

b. 1799, d. 1872

and

Mary Catherine Hart

b. 1807, d. 1855

Stay tuned! They'll be the subject of much future research (and blog posts).

In the meantime, a huge shout out to my cousin Rebecca for a copy of the marriage certificate above, which got all the research started. And thanks to cousin Tom, who journeyed with me this past year through theory after theory, lead after lead. You got your "smoking gun!" 

And thanks to Aunt Margaret, whose curiosity got this going in the first place. I hope she's pleased.