Father of Pearl

 My paternal grandmother, Pearl Brown was born 13 Dec 1894 in Oswego, Labette, Kansas. Though many of her official records have 1897 as her birth year, Pearl appears with her family in Oswego as a 4-month-old infant in the 1895 Kansas State Census. The 1897 birth year could easily have been a transcription error somewhere along the line, but knowing my grandmother, I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d made a conscious decision to shave a few years off her age.

Pearl’s parentage has been a mystery for many years. Her half-brother, Dennis Brown, was born in Hearne, Robertson, Texas in 1876 to Horace and Charity [Smith] Brown. When Charity left Texas around 1879 and settled in Oswego with Dennis and her mother and sisters, Horace Brown was not in the picture. Yet Charity had three more children born in Oswego from 1887 (Florence Brown) to 1897 (Jeff Brown). I don’t know if Pearl shared a father with these siblings but I am certain that she and older brother Dennis did not. Charity’s children all shared the Brown surname and official records often have her Texas husband’s name as father but I believe this was more for convenience than anything else.

My family always suspected that Grandma’s father was a white man, but the Horace Brown paternity myth prevailed – at least in my immediate family. Years into my research a paternal cousin who was a descendant of Dennis Brown said that the story in her family was that Grandma’s father was indeed a white man, a big land owner and farmer in Oswego named VanZandt. The VanZandts were a prominent family in Oswego, so prominent in fact that a road into town bore the family surname. I never expected to find any documentation of this rumored relationship – and I never did. When DNA testing became commercially available, I had high hopes of finding some link to the VanZandts, no matter how small, in the 70,000+ DNA matches that my father has.

The process of sorting through and researching DNA matches can be a long and frustrating task, particularly for African Americans who are lucky to find any ancestral references prior to the 1870 Federal Census. After I sorted out relatives I knew, and relatives I could figure out through further research, I started tackling the remaining DNA matches that are fourth cousins and closer. I saw surnames and geographic locations that were unknown to me. I saw clusters of matches who were clearly related to each other but for whom I could not find a solid connection to my family that I could document. For example, there is an African American cluster in Arkansas that matches my father’s paternal cousins. There is a group of white matches from Indiana that have strong ties to each other but don’t match any known relatives except me and my siblings and a paternal first cousin.

Ancestry.com recently introduced a new feature that splits DNA matches into the halves that come from each parent by analyzing segments that connect to only one parent or the other and then piecing together overlapping segments. The result is a list of DNA matches that Ancestry can group as Maternal, Paternal or Both (me, my siblings, 1st cousin, nieces/nephews). There is also a group of Unassigned matches. These include people whose tests were not processed in the last update, as well as people for whom there is not enough information to assign them to the other groups. From what I have seen, many of the Unassigned matches are distant cousins with low centimorgans (a unit for measuring genetic linkage). I’ve been browsing matches in each of the categories and the breakdown appears to be accurate.

When I look at my father’s maternal matches sorted by closest relationship, Dennis Brown’s grandchildren are the top four matches. To my surprise the next highest matches are from the white Indiana cluster - and there is not a VanZandt among them.

This cluster of DNA matches bears common surnames and locations in their family lines. There are three sets of common ancestors among them: Andrew McDavid Elmore and Phebe Pugh, Jacob Million and Mary May, and William Holliday and Catherine McKillip. Interestingly, there were many intermarriages among these family groups that explains why their descendants appear the same cluster.

My father’s closest three matches after Dennis Brown’s grandchildren are direct descendants of the Holladay and Elmore families. Two of them are great-grandchildren of James A. Holliday, the third is a great-grandchild of James’s sister Mary Jane Holliday Conrad. I will continue my research but I believe that James Holliday was Pearl Brown’s father.

James was born in 1854 in Indiana. He moved to Oswego in the 1880s and appears in the 1885 Kansas State Census as a married farmer with his wife Mary and four children.

Mary divorced James in Oswego in 1897 and has a marital status of “Widowed” in every census from 1900 until she died in 1919 though James was alive and well with his new wife in Franklin and Kansas City, Missouri where he died in 1937. My father is a high DNA match with descendants of James’s children from both of his wives.

So where is the hook-up between James and Pearl’s mother Charity? DNA is my only tangible clue. Still, I have a story in my head …

James served two short stints as City Marshal in Oswego in 1894 and 1896. Charity Brown had a reputation in Oswego for disturbing the peace of neighbors, family, and friends. She often got into physical frays that resulted in court appearances. She was also known for her “plain and emphatic” language. I can imagine James and Charity crossing paths within the justice system. She also worked as a farm laborer and may have been in James’s employ at some time. Maybe the story can be found in James’s divorce case that I have to order from the Labette County courthouse.

Right now, my father has more than one hundred DNA matches in that Indiana cluster. So far, James Holliday is the only one I have tracked to Oswego, Kansas. He was there at the right time. He was about the right age. And both of his occupations proffered opportunities for him to encounter the Notorious Charity Brown.