There Is Always More to the Story…

Tracing my family roots was a bit of an afterthought. Tim and I both signed up with Ancestry.com in 2018 but very quickly realized that finding his birth families would be all consuming and probably far more interesting (as I’ve chronicled in a 6-part blog series earlier this year: Everyone Should Know Their Story) so that’s where all our time and attention went for several months. Besides, I knew it would be easy for me to jumpstart my family tree since I grew up surrounded by generations of relatives that loved telling stories. Unlike Tim, who knew nothing about his roots other than he had been born in Ireland and adopted by an American family, I had always known where I came from, and to be completely honest, I felt no urgency to find out more.

Figuring out Tim’s roots was like a huge jigsaw puzzle but with one significant difference. Unlike a normal puzzle, this one began with no puzzle pieces.  First, we had to create them; and only then could we take the second step and begin to fit the pieces together. I found it so challenging that my interest in genealogy morphed into obsession almost overnight. It was a amazing high finding his birth families in early 2019, and once I started coming down from that I wasn’t ready to walk away so I began dabbling with my own ancestry.

One word of caution for anyone beginning this type of endeavor, train yourself to rely on data, not family folklore. With Tim’s family we knew nothing, so data was all I had to go on. But with my family, I learned pretty quickly that stories passed down through the generations provided rich and colorful anecdotes but were often dead wrong. For instance, most of my cousins on my mother’s side believe we are at least partially of Native American descent…we’re not. We had all grown up hearing the tales of our American Indian heritage, but to-date I’ve found absolutely no DNA or other evidence of that being true.

DNA had confirmed my ethnicity to be 51% British/Scottish and 45% Irish with a sliver of other European. Since Tim and I were planning a trip to Ireland in late summer 2019 to meet his newly found paternal birth family, I thought it would be fun to find out what part of Ireland my relatives were from. I suspected my Irish heritage would be on my father’s side since his family was Catholic. I knew very little about my paternal grandfather, William G. Gordon, because he died when my father was just seven years old. My dad never specifically said his father was Irish, but he did say he was Catholic. And I remember him saying his mother’s family, the Brents, had some connection to England. So, I made an educated guess that it was most likely the Gordons that were my link to Ireland.

I traced my Gordon lineage and found that they were indeed from Ireland…Co. Donegal, in fact. I was surprised since just a few months prior we had discovered that both Tim’s birth parents had deep roots in Co. Donegal. I found documentation that my 3^rd great grandfather, William Gordon, Sr. and his family emigrated to America in the late 1840s and resided initially in Philadelphia, PA at the time of the 1850 census and then moved to Iowa before the Civil War where they were farmers. I couldn’t believe the coincidence that both our families were from the same county in Ireland!

I continued to research Irish records to determine where in Co. Donegal the Gordon’s had lived. Finally, I was successful in finding the 1838 baptismal record for my 2^nd great grandfather, William F. Gordon, son of William, Sr. and the last of my lot born in Ireland. The baptism was at a Presbyterian church in Ballindrait, Clonleigh, Co. Donegal. I double and triple checked my research because this was pretty big news; our Gordon ancestors were not Irish Catholic after all!

I sent a copy of the baptismal certificate to my new sister-in-law in Donegal to see if she knew of Ballindrait or Clonleigh. Her response was immediate; she knew exactly where it was! Before I finished reading her note, a picture popped up. She had just snapped it from where she was standing on the McConnell farm at Carrickadawson, showing a hilltop in the distance that was Ballindrait. It turns out the church, Ballindrait Presbyterian, was the same one attended by generations of McConnells (Tim’s family). Of all the churches in Ireland, to our surprise and delight, our ancestors had worshipped at the same one! We’re sure they would have known each other given how small the community would have been all those year ago. But it did take a while for it to sink in that neither of our paternal ancestors were Catholic, they were definitely Presbyterian!  I really wish I had discovered all of this when my father was still alive.

My sister-in-law shared my story with Pastor Brown of Ballindrait Presbyterian as I had hoped there were additional church records that could fill in some of the gaps in my research. I was most interested to find out if some of my extended Gordon family was still in the area. How wonderful would that have been! William Gordon, Sr.’s Last Will and Testament dated 1874, made reference to his brother, James Gordon, that had remained in Ireland. We found baptismal records from Ballindrait Presbyterian dated from 1834-1846 for James’ five children but beyond that the church had no additional records. I’ve found the mid-1800s to be a difficult time to track people in Ireland because there was so much migration due to the Great Potato Famine. So, for now at least, the trail has gone cold.

It was one year ago this week that we were in Ireland meeting the McConnells and enjoying a family reunion like no other. One of my favorite memories from that trip will always be visiting the Ballindrait Presbyterian Church. I was awestruck standing at the pulpit of this Church that once connected our two families. We had made the trip to Donegal so Tim could meet his family and see where he was from, but now I too felt a tangible link to this very same place.

As I stood there, I remembered the priest that married us saying, “What an amazing story that these two young people from completely different parts of the world found each other…” As we said our vows that day in 1982, we never could have imagined how remarkable our story really was. We had no inkling that we had shared history; that our McConnell and Gordon ancestors had once been part of the same community. They worshiped together in this very same church; they baptized their babies, our great-great grandfathers, right here where I was standing. And then as often happens, our families’ paths diverged and that should have been the end of our connection. But what made our story incredible was that little twist of fate that somehow brought a guy and a girl with these shared Donegal roots back together in Washington, D.C. some 130 years later.

It still gives me chills every time I think about it.