The Search

It's important to look back and appreciate the huge amount of effort it has taken to date trying to resolve family history gaps. From the very first year of this blog in 2012, and for about as long as I've been doing family history research, a mystery on my Mom's side of the family has been the parents of her great-grandmother, Mary Alice Cain. I have spent countless hours pouring over census records, checking and rechecking marriage records, scanning for news articles and other clues to her family. The first lead came in 2014, when a Read cousin reached out to me with information identifying a brother of Mary Alice, Harl Cain. 

With that information, I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Veterans Administration for a copy of Harl's service record in the Spanish-American War. I then found an obituary for Harl in May 2014.

In August 2014, a Read cousin posted a photo of Mary Alice with her brother Harl on Ancestry. This was an amazing find, making these people more real in the search for their parents. A year later, in July 2014, Ancestry published the US Social Security Applications and Claim Index. That index revealed the name of Harl's mother, Jane Flatt (later proven to be Nancy Jane Flatt). Further digging identified the Flatt family in Metcalfe County, Kentucky and their previous home in Overton County, Tennessee. I next ordered a copy of the Civil War pension file for Pleasant Morgan, Nancy Jane's later husband, and signatory to the marriage bond for Mary Alice Cain and Charlie Read.

Pleasant Morgan's pension file arrived in August 2015. That huge file included a name for Nancy Jane's first husband, Robert Kain. It took me almost 10 years later to go through that file again and question some of the information provided by Pleasant in his request for a pension. This second look uncovered the loop in the tree and identified Pleasant as Nancy Jane's first cousin.

October 2015 surfaced the story of Nancy Jane's father, Pleasant Flatt, and a painful earlier story on the family's beginnings in Jackson County, Tennessee. I followed Nancy Jane's half-brothers, William B. Flatt and Reamus Robert Foster Flatt, and then documented Pleasant's next family and the sisters of Nancy Jane in Metcalfe County, Kentucky.

In November 2015, I had several posts on the Flatt family, Pleasant's court cases, and ultimate death as a pauper in the Metcalfe County Poor House in 1873. This also revealed Nancy Jane's time in the poor house and her delivery of Mary Alice in February 1878.

Fast-forward to 2024. Inspired by virtual DNA Day sessions from Rootstech, I dove back into the research on the Flatt family in April of this year. I speculated about possible connections to a Robert Cain who lived in Louisville and provided bar and catering services for the first running of the Kentucky Derby. Ultimately there wasn't enough of a link to this Robert, even though there were some trace amounts matching to my Mom.

In May, after watching a number of free videos from Rootstech by Diahan Southard of YourDNAGuide, I started working with the dot method on my Mom's shared matches, beginning to develop clusters of people descending from various lines. At the end of June, Ancestry launched its Pro Tools, with Enhanced Shared Matches. This was a gamechanger on my research.

By August, I developed two research questions to help target my approach to using the new Pro Tools. I also uploaded my Mom's raw AncestryDNA data to MyHeritage to expand the pool of potential DNA matches. When the calendar flipped to September, it became time to seek some expert coaching to help overcome these challenging brick wall research questions. I signed up for a Zoom session with a DNA expert, who gave some great suggestions for trying to target my approach, creating groups using the dot method. I also signed up for their DNA Study Group, going all in on trying to use the data of our shared matches of matches.

I explored the possibility that John Hubbard, son of Pleasant Flatt's third wife Nancy D. Hubbard, was the father of Mary Alice. While there's definitely some DNA in common with the Dowell and Hubbard families, it looks like we're connected to them in another way, further back along the tree or from a common community. Although it is possible Nancy Jane had a relationship with John Hubbard while the two were in the household of the Rose family in the 1870 Census, it doesn't seem that he was the father of Mary Alice. After another session with the DNA expert, she gave me some suggestions to try again while looking at the Cain Targets and Read-Cain matches to see if there might be another group of matches that may have a stronger connection.

Since then I've been pouring over the matches of matches, while also balancing primary obligations with home and work. As noted in my last post, patterns have emerged, centered in a group of families from neighboring Adair County, Kentucky.

All of the above, the 12+ years of on-again, off-again digging and searching, has arrived at a breakthrough. This would not have been possible without DNA, and without the additional time to learn how to analyze the DNA matches using the approaches in the DNA Study Group. I'm still verifying some of my findings, but am excited to write about this in an upcoming post.