Down the rabbit hole - Lauren's adventures in genealogy

For years there were whispers of Jewish ancestry in our German line. They surfaced occasionally in family conversation, but never in documentation. The records were unequivocal. My mother’s grandparents were known, named, and recorded as Protestant. A generation ago, the question would have ended there. Instead, I took an Ancestry DNA test. The results came back as expected in many respects: Irish and English from my father; German, Polish and Balkan from my mother. But there was something else. 12.5% Ashkenazi. Ethnicity estimates are often imprecise. But Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry is unusually reliable due to centuries of endogamy. Twelve and a half percent does not represent a distant ancestor. It points to a great-grandparent. To narrow the possibilities, I tested my mother: a generation closer, and therefore genetically more informative. Her results removed any lingering ambiguity. Twenty-one percent Ashkenazi. That percentage could not be reconciled with the documented lin...

When I finished writing about the six wives of Captain Kearney, I more or less thought I had uncovered all the surprises this man had to offer. There were unanswered questions - like why could I not find his entry into Australia, or how he met his first wife Elizabeth Gilpin, or how Mary Reeves Rainsford found out about his death - but I thought I had a handle on the man. I was wrong. When I was writing up the stories of his wives, I happened to re-examine a document I have read dozens of times. It is a NSW Police Gazette and stated that Richard Adderley Kearney had been released from prison after his bigamy charge - he served 9 months of a twelve month hard labour sentence in Darlinghurst Prison. I had read this document dozens of times. I had quoted it. I had analysed it. And yet, this time, I saw something I had never noticed before. Beneath his name: “alias Vine.” NSW Police Gazette, 1879 In all the hundreds of hours I had put into researching this man, no single other document had...