Sometime you have the experience of staring at a jumble of shapes and then realising that they actually make a bird, or a rabbit, or a person. Genealogy research can be like that too.
When you get your DNA results, you get notified of clusters of people who share particular DNA fragments with you. I’ve chased down a number of these over the last few years, often finding to my frustration that the records run into the sand at just the moment where I could have worked out how they were related to me. For instance, there are two different groups of African Americans who share bits of my genetic heritage, and I have half a clue how one of those groups may be related to me, but no clue at all about the other.
I did manage to resolve one such cluster of contacts recently, to my own satisfaction. There are a bunch of Ancestry users who are related to each other, and to me, and they are all descended from a Canadian couple, Patrick Morrissey, born on Prince Edward Island in 1856, died in Nova Scotia 1930, and Annie Flynn, born in 1865 and died in 1920, both on Prince Edward Island. The DNA links are sufficiently close that one of Patrick or Annie must be the first cousin of one of my grandparents.
As it happens, I knew that one of my grandparents had an uncle who was stationed in Canada as an Irish element of the British garrison there from 1858 to 1870. This is too late for him to be Patrick’s father, but exactly right for Annie. He married in 1863, moved back to Ireland in 1870, had two children with his first wife there and three more by his second wife after his first wife died. I am in touch with his Irish-line descendants. I have no documentary evidence placing him on Prince Edward Island; he seems to have spent most of his time in Ontario.
Annie Flynn’s mother, Johanna Pendergast, married James Flynn in 1862. She was 23; he was 37. They had four children, all of whom were recorded of course as being the children of Johanna and James. But it looks very likely that Annie at least was not James Flynn’s biological child, but the result of a liaison between Johanna and my great-great-uncle. Her grandchildren score matching DNA with me at the third cousin level, suggesting that we have common great-great-grandparents, which would fit the hypothesis. And most crucially, I cannot place any of my other great-grandparents’ many siblings in Canada at any point in their lives, let alone in 1864.
When Annie Flynn was born in June 1865, her mother, Johanna (born in 1840), had been married to James Flynn since October 1862, and her likely father (born in 1839) to his first wife since November 1863. We’ll never know how two relatively recently married people in their mid twenties came together in the autumn of 1865 and produced Annie. Perhaps he was visiting Charlottetown from Ontario as part of his army duties; we don’t know if it was romantic, transactional, or something else. But thanks to the DNA that I share with Annie’s descendants, we can be pretty certain that it did happen. You will have to use your imagination for the rest.