The Chef

 

Photo by Patrick Jones. Belfast. 27 June 2025.

The mural above, by Australian artist SMUG, was noted as Belfast's most Instagrammed mural in 2021. This piece was painted in 2016, and still looks pretty sharp. This chef and lobster watches above an alley drinking spot at High Street Court. 

Testing the DNAPainter Matrix tool

 

DNAPainter Matrix.

DNAPainter has a new shared DNA matrix tool (launched in May 2025). You can read more about it on their blog. I tried it out using a group of mystery matches on my Mom's side of the tree. These people likely connect into our Portillo branch, but I have not quite worked out how. Some of them are very closely related to each other (parent-child, siblings, first cousins, etc). It is somewhat useful, but given how much time it takes to enter the data, maybe just sticking with the Shared Matches of Matches tool on Ancestry's DNA ProTools is enough.

Update: There's a new blog entry I missed describing some updates to the matrix tool (see DNAPainter Blog, 28 Aug 2025).

Of interest to data nerds

Data nerds or others interested in the computing details of how Ancestry manages its massive data sets will be interested in reading this blog published yesterday by AWS (Amazon Web Services). They describe "how Ancestry optimizes a 100-billion-row Iceberg table".

From the Alte Nationalgalerie

 

Photo by Patrick Jones. Berlin. 7 June 2025.

The painting above is from the Alte Nationalgalerie of the State Museum of Berlin, by French artist Narcisse Virgillo Diaz de la Peña. The painting is "Oriental Woman with her daughter" from 1865. This probably depicts a scene from Ottoman Türkiye, and reminds me of the painting of the Ottoman woman I shared in 2015 from the Istanbul Painting and Sculpture Museum.

482 new newspapers added

Newspapers.com has added new content this summer, from 482 newspapers across the US, Canada, England and Scotland. There's a subscription required, but if you have Ancestry's All Access or a Newspapers.com subscription, you can now search in these sources.

Several Spanish language newspapers have been added from California. A quick look in some of these papers for "Campuzano" revealed an entry for Jose Maria Campuzano, who I wrote about previously as a tailor in Los Angeles in 1875.

Las Dos Republicas. 27 Feb 1875.

Another entry shows Jose Maria Campuzano was in Los Angeles from October 1873, as there was a letter sent through Wells Fargo express for him. An earlier entry in the newspaper was dated from 6 September 1873, for another letter sent through Wells Fargo. Jose Maria also contributed funds for a Cinco de Mayo event in Los Angeles in May 1873.

Las Dos Republicas. 4 Oct 1873.

 I have more looking to do in these new sources.

End of Summer

 

Photo by Patrick Jones. Tompkins County, NY. 16 Aug 2025.

According to the calendar it is the last week of August, which means it is a short week as we head into Labor Day weekend. This marks the traditional end of summer, although we expect it will remain summer-like in temperatures for a bit longer here on the East Coast. This is the time of the year where the calendar picks up speed. Shorter days, lots of activity.

"Objectionable"

 

Rigoberto Gonzalez. 2020.

Read the full article on NPR. The 2020 painting above was a competition finalist for the National Portrait Gallery. This piece reminds me of the 2019 Phillips Collection exhibition called The Warmth of Other Suns, which raised still timely questions about migration and global displacement.

Artist unknown. The Phillips Collection. 15 Sept 2019.

I'll also highlight this 2018 piece by LA artist Patrick Martinez from the Beyond the Streets exhibition.

Photo by Patrick Jones. Art by Patrick Martinez. 19 May 2018.

This type of attack on art happened in 1937 Germany. History comes back around.

Patterns

 

Photo by Patrick Jones. Lisbon. 17 Oct 2023.

While awaiting the mtDNA test results for a Campuzano cousin, I have been looking at matches on FamilyTreeDNA and am exploring some possible patterns. One way is to sort my mitochondrial DNA haplogroup. Eight of my Mom's matches who have taken the mtFull test have haplogroup A, there's another big group with A2 (including my own A2d2a). All of these people will have connections to Indigenous Mexico & Latin America. The first 125 matches fall into variations of the A, B, and C haplogroups.

Another pattern I'm looking at are those people who have taken a YDNA or mtFull test and have potential Sephardic connections. One match has the HV0b mtDNA haplogroup. A 2014 paper titled Echoes from Sepharad: signatures on the maternal gene-pool of crypto-Jewish descendants, states the HV0b haplogroup may be connected to a Sephardic Jewish founding lineage in northeastern Portugal. This woman has 20 matches in common with my Mom, including two who I know connect with our Quijada side of the tree. One of these Quijada matches is also on Ancestry, and is 10% Basque and 3% Sephardic.

A question to resolve with mtDNA

 

Photo by Patrick Jones. Berlin, 7 June 2025.

A great example of something to resolve with mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) involves the wives of John Carter (1715-1783). John, my 7th-great-grandfather, had three wives:

• Elizabeth Armistead (1716, died about 1738)
• Sarah Kenyon (died about 1763); my 7th-great-grandmother
• Hannah Chew (died in 1821)

John had two daughters with Elizabeth, four daughters with Sarah, and five daughters with Hannah. If the mtDNA trail runs to the present through those three lines, then testing descendants of those wives would give mtDNA haplogroups which should be different. My own line descends down from a great-granddaughter of Sarah, Emily Ann Heslop Ballard. There are female descendants of Emily who could potentially take a mtDNA test. 

There is a Carter Society of Virginia (website not currently working, but the group has a Facebook page). Perhaps this question is one the Carter Society has already started looking into.

A good example of what such a mtDNA study could provide can be seen in the Spring 2024 issue of the Journal of Genetic Genealogy, on the Identification of the Mitochondrial Haplogroup of Elizabeth Martiau (PDF). She was my 9th-great-grandmother.

Waiting on records

 

Question to FamilySearch. Aug 2025.

FamilySearch has an amazing feature called Full text Search, which you can find on the FamilySearch Labs page (free account required). Since it was launched, I've been using this feature regularly. It's a great tool and new records are added all the time. A big gripe that I have with the tool is that it's missing records for the state of Sonora, Mexico. Of course, this is the location where most of my Mexican branches of the tree were living. I am anticipating full text search will help uncover new-to-me records on my various lines (Campuzano, Amado, Vasquez, Portillo, Quijada, Suastegui, Diaz, etc, etc).

I've asked a question to the FamilySearch team in their Community feature (see image above), on when will Sonoran records be added to Full text search. So, we'll see what they say, and hopefully new records from Sonora will appear on Full text search soon.

Update: I posted this question, and received a reply from someone suggested I put the question in the Full text search help section. Which I did, and then went to dinner. After dinner, I saw I had a reply from a helpful person at FamilySearch, who said he would check around and report back. He said he did not have a schedule when different areas are being added, but thought it would be eventually added. So that's promising.

John in 1850

 

Created in Ideogram. John O'Brien in La Salle, about 1850.

I've used Ideogram previously to generate a possible likeness for Bridget O'Brien and her daughter Agnes, as well as one for my 3rd-great-grandfather Gabriel Vasquez, and 3rd-great-grandparents Marianna Hais and Samuel Oyler at the Buck Tavern in Ohio in 1850. Although we do have the painting of John O'Brien, recreated by my Gumpy in 1960 from the original painted by Shelbyville, Illinois artist Robert Root probably in the 1890s when John was much older. We also have a great photo showing John's son, my 2nd-great-grandfather, John J. O'Brien with a group of coal miners (and their cats) in 1903 Illinois.

Above is a possible scene for John, showing him standing above the Illinois and Michigan Canal in La Salle County, Illinois about 1850. Ideogram has improved "character consistency", so once I'm happy with a likeness, I can use that to create other scenes similar to what I've done with the lullaby image for Bridget.

Related to my ongoing research questions, while reading about Irish naming conventions to test a theory on the parents for Bridget and John, I ran across the excellent Irish Family Roots blog and thought I should share a link for future reference. Donna also creatively uses AI-generated images and photos in her blog posts, and it's good to see I'm not alone in trying to reimagine historical scenes involving branches of our family.

YouTube History Gems (August)

While family history TV is a regular subject on the blog (see also Tuesday's post), I am a big fan of YouTube, and more often I find myself watching shows or documentaries on that platform rather than "long form" television or streaming series - although the new Chief of War on Apple TV+ is so good. This will probably become a periodic feature to share links to interesting videos too.

A few recent (or new-to-me) videos from this week in mid-August:

• A Last Ride in New York City's Disappearing Horse Elevators (Bloomberg). This video is really interesting, and hits the sweet spot between brief and short enough (12 minutes). I had not thought before how many horses might have been kept on upper floors of buildings in the early days of elevators in NYC. Now there's less than a handful of these elevators left, and by next year, maybe none.
• Continuing with the theme of New York history, author Russell Shorto has a recent book (from March 2025) called Taking Manhattan; the Extraordinary Events that Created New York and Shaped America. I've ordered it, and here's a talk about the book called Taking Manhattan with Russell Shorto with The New York Historical (6:52 minutes). I'm cheating a little, this talk is a few months old, but it's new to me! With my own Dutch connection to New Amsterdam, this book should be a very relevant read and one that connects to my own family's experience during the time.
• Crossing the Pond; Finding your immigrant ancestors (Ancestry) - an hour-long virtual Wednesday event by Ancestry's Crista Cowan, focusing on immigration to the US and Canada between 1850-1950. Super interesting and timely.
• Why Spinning Meat Tastes So Good (Andy Cooks). It's food history from a New Zealand chef, and now I'm hungry for al pastor tacos, döner and shawarma. This definitely hits as I like döner, love al pastor tacos, and meat cooked via this method across so many cultures is always good. I've had döner in Türkiye and Germany (it's great) and I can definitely see the line from döner to shawarma to al pastor. This reminds me to mention the Netflix series the Taco Chronicles, which isn't on YouTube but is a great mix of food and cultural history and is very relevant to this thread of sharing links to shows & series worth watching.
• The One Song podcast is amazingly great (so so great, please like & subscribe, I get no sponsorship from it.). I listened to probably 14 or more episodes while driving up to Ithaca & back this past weekend, and I've listened to about as many other episodes on earlier long drives (they have about 100 as of this post). The episodes can be streamed on Spotify (video and audio) and watched on YouTube. These aren't just about a single song but weave in music history, geeky musicology, cultural connections, and more. I learn something new every time, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. This month they've had a two-part series on Jimi Hendrix, a fascinating breakdown with Lil Jon on his mega hit Get Low (who I've seen at The Grove in LA with my parents and kids back in 2010 when Jon went shopping at the Apple Store), and most recently a 90s flashback on the Chemical Brothers' Let Forever Be. I highly recommend it (typed that twice). It's so good and I'm a big fan of this podcast.

Finding Your Roots Season 12

The 12th season of Finding Your Roots returns in January 2026, with a new slate of guests announced today (see People or the Finding Your Roots page on FB). Some of these guests have appeared on prior seasons of Who Do You Think You Are, so it will be interesting to see how their FYR stories differ, possibly following other family branches.

• Spike Lee (see full episode on YouTube)
• America Ferrera (2015, some episode clips available on YouTube)
• Kristin Chenoweth (2012)

Season 11 featured some fascinating stories, and episodes 8, 9, and 10 to close out the season were particularly strong and Emmy-worthy. These episodes are available for streaming on PBS and YouTube TV.

Back to school

There may be a few more weeks of calendar summer, but it's time for a new school year for our students. One is now back at college for year two, and another is starting a pivotal year of high school. Soon we'll be off to college visits, and before we know it we'll have both students on their way with post-secondary plans.

Now isn't the time to get too far ahead of ourselves, but we're entering the period of the year that seems to accelerate. Back to school is a milestone. Good luck to the new year!

A lullaby

 

Ideogram. Bridget, 1850s.

Another imagined scene for Bridget, singing to one of her children in La Salle County, Illinois in the 1850s. I have to think some of Agnes' amazing talent was inherited from Bridget, absorbed as she sang to her daughter in late 1858/early 1859. This image is about the best we can do at this stage to picture Bridget with Agnes (or her other children) before Bridget's passing about August 1859.

This scene is in contrast to later images for Agnes as she is performing around the US and Canada. More to follow.

Testing a theory

In the current absence of information on the parents of my 3rd-great-grandmother Bridget, I'm trying a theory using the traditional Irish naming pattern to see if that helps uncover some leads in Roscommon and Longford, Ireland.

Two blogs, English Ancestors (March 2020) and FamilyLocket (January 2025), provide a helpful guide to the naming pattern (see these blogs for the pattern). From the information that I have, Bridget had at least seven children: three with her first husband Patrick Dooner, and four with her second husband (my 3rd-great-grandfather) John O'Brien. From looking at the names of the children, and based on the facts that I have about Patrick Dooner's parents, it's possible Bridget and Patrick made some adjustments to the naming pattern.

Bridget and Patrick:

• John Dooner (possibly named after Bridget's father or Patrick's grandfather?)
• Hugh Dooner (Patrick's father was named Hugh or Bridget's father was also named Hugh, or they deviated from the naming pattern here)
• Michael J. Dooner (named after Patrick's uncle Michael or Bridget's father was Michael)

Bridget and John:

• Anna Maria O'Brien (possibly named after Bridget's mother?)
• Isabella O'Brien (possibly named after John's mother?)
• John J. O'Brien (either named after John's father or after John directly)
• Agnes O'Brien (named after Bridget's oldest sister?)

Using this naming convention, I'm looking for baptismal records about 1793 in or near County Clare for John with parents John O'Brien and Isabella, and in Longford for a Bridget born about 1824 with a father's name of John or Michael and mother Anne or Anna.

From Belfast Central Station

 

Photo by Patrick Jones. Belfast Central Station, 27 Jun 2025.

This striking mural is at the entrance/exit of Belfast Central Station, and is part of a series of historical themed images. This one highlights the city's linen industry and a young woman who might have worked at the linen factory. The one below is more mystical, featuring an Irish faerie.

Photo by Patrick Jones. Belfast, 27 June 2025.

Responses lacking

Back in December 2024, I used the BIRLS database request tool launched by Reclaim the Records to submit FOIA requests for a full copy of the veteran's claim file on my grandfather Leo Reid, Allison's grandfather James Havens, as well as a couple of other requests on deceased veterans in the family. Responses to two of these have now arrived in the mail. 

I had given up hope of any response, as the Department of Veterans Affairs has been impacted by significant staff reductions and cuts. I really thought these would be ignored. The responses were prepared by the Evidence Intake Center in Janesville, Wisconsin. I am not going to post the responses and I am still in the process of figuring out how, if at all, to respond.

It seems the VA is withholding the information in the C-File related to the veterans' military service and interactions with the VA, as it has deemed the information to be either confidential or "detrimental to the memory of the Veteran and/or prejudicial to the interests of the Veteran's survivors and the Government."

It's a bit frustrating as I have received copies of service record information in the past, but perhaps that request had been submitted differently so that it yielded the right information in return.

I know a few things about Leo's time in the Air Force during WWII from his original flight logs, but I was hoping the C-File would contain some other information about his service.

In the meantime I've reached out to the team at Reclaim the Records to see if they've run across this issue, and if they have any suggestions. Update - From their website (as of August 2025), it seems they've also encountered this and are exploring options.

The responses were generated by the VA on 31 July and 4 August 2025, so I have 90 days from those dates to submit appeals.

Dockers' Rest

 

Photo by Patrick Jones. Belfast, 27 June 2025.

The shot above is from a wall next to the Titanic Museum in Belfast, by artists Terry Bradley and "Friz". The work depicts the shipyard men of Belfast.

In the Sioux City Journal, 1894

 

Sioux City Journal, 21 Nov 1894

From time to time new articles and collections appear on Newspapers.com, so it is important to check periodically. Back in May, I located a new-to-me article on Agnes Atherton losing a diamond sunburst pin in 1909 Cincinnati. Above and below are newly added articles from the Sioux City Journal, describing a larceny of two diamond rings belonging to Agnes, while she was performing in the city.

Sioux City Journal. 22 Nov 1894.

Preston Wakefield appears to have been an acrobat, perhaps in the Gillette Brothers act led by Agnes' partner/husband Alfred Gillette. Later by 1897, Wakefield appears in a news clipping as an acrobat with the Barnum and Bailey circus. He was a known bad character in Sioux City. In 1892, his father published an article in the paper warning people not to trust him and that he would not pay his debts for contracting. He was arrested at least three times in 1894, and appeared in the Sioux City Journal in April 1894 after he was wounded in a fight with "Wienerwurst John", whose "face was pounded to the color of raw beef, one eye was black and the other was swollen completely shut."

Agnes would have been 36 at the time. The rings, worth about $100 in 1894, would be worth about $3700 today. It seems incredibly naïve of her to have asked Wakefield to pick up the rings. In the 1893 City Directory for Sioux City, Wakefield was listed as a student, and he would have been about 20 years in 1894. 

History in the news

 A selection of articles:

- A story from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles on the facial reconstruction of a 3,500 year old Greek warrior

- A fascinating story in the LA Times about a missing mother who reappeared in Arizona decades later. DNA and mentions of Sonora and Arizona led me to read the story. Who knows, I'm probably related to these people given how many of our DNA matches in Sonora and Arizona are related to each other.

- A BBC article from 5 July on the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland

Dora, Agnes and Emily

 

Source: Ancestry.

An undated photo, from left to right showing Dora Allman, Agnes Lydia Allman (my 2nd-great-grandmother) and Emily Rachel Davis Allman (my 3rd-great-grandmother). The photo was probably taken about 1882 or a little before, in Vermilion County, Illinois.

In the deeds

 

FamilySearch. Vermilion County, Illinois. 1865.

After seeing the photo of my 3rd-great-grandparents William and Emily (who often went by Rachel E. Allman), I looked again on FamilySearch Full-text search for deeds in Vermilion County, Illinois involving the couple. Above is a sale of 8 acres by William and Emily to John Edwards, of land that had been partitioned from the estate of Azariah Davis, Emily's father.

Another land sale from 16 March 1867 shows the couple selling off 5 more acres partitioned from the estate. They sold off 5 more acres from the estate on 30 March 1867 to John Price. An earlier land sale shows Emily and her Davis siblings jointly selling off a plot of land from the estate on 7 February 1865.

On 20 April 1861, Emily and her Davis siblings executed a sale of land for the benefit of their father's second wife, Hettie Redman Davis.

FamilySearch. 20 Apr 1861.

There are a ton of deeds to sort through on the Allman and Davis families in Vermilion County. I'm in the process of separating out the ones that connect backward from William and the ones belonging to the Davis line.

William and Emily

 

Source: Ancestry. 

Above is a photo of my 3rd-great-grandparents William Allman and Emily Rachel Davis Allman, shared to Ancestry by a distant cousin in 2023. This photo, and a few others, popped up recently on Ancestry's daily photo hints. I'm not sure why I missed this earlier. Here's a link to my 2013 post on their marriage record from 1861.

Research Progress August 2025

This is a progress check on various DNA research questions since my previous update in July. With this update, I am moving to a new format for the research areas.

Paternal side

1 - Identifying the Irish parents of Bridget, my 3rd-great-grandmother. In July I tried some new approaches, isolating the DNA matches in common between my Dad's results and his first cousin MO on FamilyTreeDNA. I have also been looking at a couple of bubble groups from Ancestry's Shared matches of matches tool who have ancestors connecting back to County Longford, Ireland.

There's another possibly I had not considered until I started drafting this post. In 1854, John and Bridget O'Brien purchased a plot of land in La Salle, Illinois from Patrick Dooley. Looking quickly on Ancestry, Patrick was likely born in Roscommon, Ireland. I need to look closer to see if he was connected to Bridget through family.

2 - Determining the generation of connection for the Pennsylvania O'Briens. I watched a webinar on generation of connection by Diahan Southard of YourDNAGuide, who I have heard give a version of this talk a couple of times, and I am going to try again. I still think these people either descended from a brother of my 3rd-great-grandfather John O'Brien or are a first family of John's before he reappeared in La Salle, Illinois about 1850.

3 - Looking for potential matches descending from the Westall/Thornhill side of the tree to do a mtDNA test (New research idea)

4 - Looking for mtDNA test candidates descending from the McIntosh side of the tree

5 - Locating another Jones cousin for YDNA testing

6 - Trying new-to-me tools to isolate matches descending from Ireland on MyHeritage

Maternal side

1 - Identify possible siblings of my 3rd-great-grandfather Gabriel Vasquez

2 - Working with DNA matches connected to the Amado side of the tree

3 - Awaiting mtDNA results (and XDNA data) from a Campuzano cousin who is testing through FTDNA

4 - Identifying the connection with the mystery Guerrero-Leyva matches

The mermaid and the diver

 

Photo by Patrick Jones. Belfast. 27 June 2025.