On Streaming: Our Father

 

Wikipedia; Netflix. Our Father (2022).

Our Father is a 2022 documentary currently available for viewing on Netflix. Although this has been available for a while, I recently watched it, and thought the documentary was important to share given the topics of DNA testing and the location of my school age home in Indianapolis. The documentary centers on a woman (Jacoba Ballard) who learns her mother went to a fertility doctor, and the doctor used his own sperm to impregnate unsuspecting patients. Ballard learned through testing on 23andMe that she had eight half-siblings (see this summary on Time from May 2022). The documentary describes her story and several of the half-siblings as they seek justice.

It's not a spoiler that at the end of the documentary, there were 94 half-siblings. Three years later, the sibling count is up to at least 107 (source: Reddit). There is an April 2025 article in the Indiana Capital Chronicle on another lawsuit against the doctor.

I partly watched this because the story is set in Indianapolis. We had moved away from Indy when the story initially broke on this case, so I was not familiar with this at the time. I certainly could have gone to school with people who were of the age of the children involved, who would now be adults. The doctor in the cases and documentary retired in 2009, and DNA testing may continue to reveal additional half-siblings.

The documentary highlights a consequence of DNA testing - relationships that exist will be revealed. Ancestry, MyHeritage and 23andMe have tools that show match relationships. Ancestry shows how matches of matches are connected, and if you have ProTools, it is incredibly powerful for identifying how people through their DNA matches are connected to each other.

Big Y one year later

A year ago I received my Big Y-700 results through FamilyTreeDNA. On my own results I am no closer than last year, as there still are not other Jones testers connected to my line in East Tennessee. As hinted in my last post, cousin Greg has now received the upgraded Big Y results on his Campuzano kit. Unlike my own Jones kit, Greg has two matches on the Block Tree, so now I definitely need to revisit the YDNA materials to understand how or whether these are actionable matches.

Made in Ideogram. A Spanish soldier, 1580.

His new haplogroup is a subclade of the larger R-DF27, which has a high connection to Northern Spain and Basque Country. There's more to do analyzing the results, but this is a promising sign for the links to Spain.

An update on our Spanish YDNA line

 

FTDNA Discover Report for R-BY70696.

Our cousin Greg's YDNA haplogroup has updated, giving a closer in time most recent common ancestor of about 1250 CE. The scientific details page provides a bit more information, showing the range for the most recent common ancestor is 724-1583 CE. The 1500s takes us into the age of the conquistadors and Spanish colonization of Mexico.

FTDNA.

This haplogroup update has arrived before the Big Y 700 results, so perhaps there will be further refinement in the near future. 

Using Transkribus for Old German

 

Transkribus.

Transkribus is a platform for text recognition, image analysis and structure recognition for historic documents. It is a European-developed artificial intelligence tool, with an increasing number of non-European institutions joining the cooperative behind the platform. I remember seeing them at RootsTech 2025, but until now I had used it. The old German handwriting on the documents for my current search is a perfect use for the tool.

Using an extract from the Saxony Anhalt Baptism records of 1817 I shared earlier, above is an example showing the entry for Anna Dorothea Sophia Hesse, daughter of Friedrich Hesse and Dorothea Sophia Gagelmann. Once the image is loaded onto the Transkribus platform, it takes a few seconds to scan, and the tool returns a helpful transcription into German on the right side. This can be copied and pasted into Google Translate, giving a pretty good approximation of the text.

It is free to create an account, and there are different tiers from free with limited credits, to scholar to team and organization. I'll be trying out the tool further on these German texts.

Differences in the records

Most of the records on Maria Elizabeth Hesse show her birth year as 1823 or 1824 in the 1870 and 1880 US Census. Her headstone in Edwards County, Illinois shows 1823. And yet, there's a baptismal record from Roxförde, Saxony from March 1821 for a Maria Dorothea Elizabeth Hesse, daughter of Dorothea Sophia Gagelmann of Klüden (a town 3 km south of Roxförde). Maybe this is an older sister with a similar name, or perhaps this is the right baptism record.

Source: Ancestry. Saxony Anhalt Baptisms, Marriages and Burials.

One challenge is I find German handwriting from this era to be very difficult to read. I'm much better with Spanish or French handwriting on similar records.

An earlier record from 1817 shows a baptism record for another daughter of Dorothea Sophia, this time for Anna Dorothea Sophia, on 30 March 1817 in the parish of Roxförde.

Source: Ancestry. Saxony Anhalt Baptisms.