Living DNA's Terrible Update/ A Good Irish Match/A little DNA Fun

On July 23rd 2021 I received an email from Living DNA which stated more precise ethnicity results were now available. I initiated the update and the results were updated a short time after that. The results weren't more precise. I'm definitely not 88.8% French. One great-great grandfather was French Canadian, which would make me 6.25% French, and that's all the French I have going back a few hundred years.

I have no clue where the Pashtun results fit in either? I've never received a result like that from any other company? I haven't traced my family back to that part or the world either. 

The previous ethnicity results were far more accurate and reflect my heritage as I know it. I praised these results in the past. 

One of my grandparents was Nicaraguan, another was born in Austria, a 3rd grandparent was a mix of Irish, French Canadian, and British Isles, and a 4th grandparent was a mix of British Isles and German. With a mixed European ancestry like that you would expect to see a long list of predicted ethnicities, like the previous results below. 

It would be nice if Living DNA fixed their current ethnicity results. 

Living DNA Interesting match

Going over our family's DNA matches at Living DNA I did find an interesting DNA match who lives in the UK. He shares 41 cM's with my aunt Loretta. I suspect he shares our Irish roots? I messaged him but have not heard back from him. Irish matches could be useful since very few church records survive in Ireland in the area where my family lived. If we could pool the information for our best Irish matches we might be able to extend our tree farther back?

A Little DNA Fun

At this point I'm not getting as many helpful DNA matches and the interesting ones I have aren't responding to my messages. I decided to see what else I could do with my DNA results in the meantime. 

I uploaded my raw DNA data to Genomelink for the fun of it. Most of the studies your DNA is compared to aren't large studies. The study regarding neuroticism is a good study. If you would like to know your genetic predisposition to neuroticism you can upload your raw data to Genomelink. It's free to access these results.   

I am prone to neuroticism in certain cases. I'm certainly a germaphobe, as was one of my grandmother's who would Lysol the entire house when someone was sick (she definitely would be panicked about COVID). Our phobias have kept us alive anyway, haha.  

If I had more segment data to work with my DNA research wouldn't be stalled. I'll keep working with what I have and hope to break down another brickwall soon?

A Case Study of a Mystery DNA match

When I was checking DNA matches a while back I noticed a very close match. This was a good match for me and a great match for an Aunt. He is predicted to be either a great-grandfather or great-grandson, great-uncle or great-nephew,  or 1st cousin of my Aunt L. First cousin seemed to be the most likely since the other relationships seemed impossible since my Aunt was born in 1937 and the match was born in 1934. A grandson of this match also tested at the same company. A son tested at another company and a granddaughter of the match tested at a 3rd company.

The chromosome browser below illustrates how much DNA my Aunt shares with this match we will call Mark Smith. They share 13.0% (924.8‎ cM) of DNA.

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I’m predicted to be a 2nd cousin or 1st cousin once removed to Mark Smith. I share 3.7% (261.1‎ cM) of DNA.

I was able to narrow down this match as descending from a particular set of great-grandparents Frank Kappel and Mary Kurta of Chicago, Illinois. These great-grandparents had 11 children and I had no idea which of the daughters might be the mother of Mark Smith? I believed it would have been a daughter he descended from because he didn’t share my great-grandparents surname.

I contacted the match so I could attach his results to the correct parent relationship. I was surprised when the match messaged me and said he didn’t know how we were related? Being an obvious first cousin, how could that be? The match seemed uninterested in delving any further into this so I moved on and just figured his mother had a different maiden name because of a divorce or something? Also possible his father had a different surname for the same reasons.

A mutual match asked me if I knew how this match was related to our mutual families? I said he was definitely a first cousin of my Aunt L. I then decided to see if I could figure out which of my great-grandparents' children our match Mark Smith might be the son of?

My assumption was there was a surname change involving his parents for some reason. I quickly found out I was wrong about that. Mark Smith’s mother was 19 and father listed on the birth certificate was 21 when Mark was born. We’ll call his parents John Smith and Jane Jones. They married a month after Mark Smith was born. The surname on Mark’s birth certificate is Smith even though the couple wasn’t married at the time of his birth.





It would be unlikely for such a young couple to adopt a child. The most likely scenario is that John Smith isn’t Mark Smith’s father. Jane Jones gave birth to someone else's son in 1934. Either she told John Smith Mark was his son or John married her knowing he wasn’t his father.

Obviously one of my Great-Uncles is the father of Mark Smith. Jane Jones and my great-grandparents lived in the same city. There were two sons of my great-grandparents close to Jane’s age. Herman Kappel and William Kappel are the best candidates to be the father of Mark Smith. William was killed in Germany in WWII and left only one son. Herman had several children. DNA testing of descendants of these men could establish who the father of Mark Smith was.

In 1940 Jane Jones was in a State mental hospital. Her son was not living with John Smith. He was living with her Jones family. Her husband was back living with his Smith family. The couple divorced. Mark Smith wasn’t mentioned in the obituary of John Smith; the only children mentioned were from his second marriage. 

I have the Kappel family Y DNA haplogroup. If the son of Mark Smith would make his haplogroup public at 23andMe we could further confirm our relationship.

 I now feel my previous conclusion that this match was a first cousin of my aunt has been strengthened by this research and documentation. I can now tentatively assign these matches through this family as descending through one of the sons of Frank Kappel and Mary Kurta.

Pullman Employee Cards

 

Pullman Private Car

Pullman Employee Records

I found the Pullman employee cards, bottom of post, for my family at Familysearch.org. The digitized collection is called "Employee records, ca. 1900-1949" (be sure to sign-in to your free account to see the unlocked records at FamilySearch).

The full employee files are not online and are held by the South Suburban Genealogical & Historical Society, South Holland, Illinois. This collection at the historical society is called the "Pullman Car Works Collection", and can only be searched by society staff members. You can request a search of these records at their website.

Types of information on the cards include nationality, race, and date of birth. The cards also give you an idea of when the person worked at Pullman. It's interesting to see how the employees were contracted to work on certain projects as recorded by dates hired and dates dropped. Employment wasn't guaranteed because of that. They could be laid off if there were no orders for them to work on. Since my great-grandfather began working for Pullman in 1910, and built up seniority, he worked steadily for them until his death in 1937. 

Since Frank Kappel worked for the company for so long I found more information recorded about him on these cards. For instance I didn't know Frank worked for the Standard Steel Car Company in Hammond, Indiana before working for Pullman. I also discovered he lived in a Pullman building when he started working for them. He lived in Pullman Block F. After his large family joined him he would have had to find a house to rent. 

Additional information for Frank Kappel appeared on a service form card when he first began working at Pullman. These forms were older than the employee index cards; they date from about 1900 to 1914. The forms include such information as sex, age, country of birth (may include countries of birth of parents, but not in my case), years in US, Naturalization information, marital status, number of dependents, last employer, and whether any relatives work for the company. There was also a section with information furnished to the Immigration Commission regarding their occupation before coming to the US, information about family, and language skills of immigrants.

 

Frank's last name is recorded as Keppel, likely because he entered the country under that name. 

My grandfather Rudolph Kapple (another surname spelling change) worked on and off for Pullman. He didn't have the seniority his father did and was laid off during the depression. He along with my grandmother Dorothy Mason-Kapple worked for Pullman during WWII when there was a labor shortage and workers laid off during the Great Depression were rehired. 

Family employee cards

Employee card for my great-grandfather Frank Kappel who began working for Pullman in 1910. 

 

My great-grandmother Mary Kappel's Employment card. 

 

My great-uncle Stephen Kappel's employment card.

 

My paternal grandfather Rudolph Kapple's employment card. During WWII Pullman also made other war related products such as aircraft. My grandfather worked in the aircraft division during WWII.

 

 

 My great-uncle Joseph Kappel's employment card

 

 

 

 My paternal grandmother Dorothy Mason-Kapple's employee card

 

 

My great-great uncle Frank Kurta's employee card. 

 

My great-great uncle Herman Kurta's employee card. 

I requested a search for additional information from the historical society. I haven't received anything yet, and may not receive anything for a long time due to the COVID shutdown.

Photos of mothers and children in honor of Mother's Day. 

Photos of my paternal grandmother Dorothy Winifred Mason-Kapple, daughter of Fred Mason and Helen Mullen, with her with her children

My Robert John Kapple and his sisters in 1930's Chicago

My father looks like a handful in the photo below. My grandmother said he took one of my aunts somewhere in a wagon, when she was a baby, to see a turtle near the train tracks a block from their Chicago home. Apparently she left my aunt alone for a little bit and when she returned my aunt was missing. 

Photos of my maternal grandmother Graciela Lucresia Del Castillo-Forgey, daughter of Nicasio Del Castillo and Elena Garcia with her children. 

In this photo are my grandmother's 5 children and her twins Charles and Cecil Forgey. 

Below a play date and get together for neighborhood mother's in Glendale, California in the 1930's. 

Another Play date below 1930's style

Below is a picture of me with my own mother Edna Fay Forgey-Kapple

I was so fat here it too my mother and two cousins to hold me up. 

I will close this trip down memory lane with a favorite photo that was shared with me by a distant Austrian cousin; it's of my great-grandmother Mary Kurta-Kappel and two of her 11 children in the early 1900's. 

Wishing all mothers a Very Happy Mother's Day! 

Looking for a Mystery House/ And identifying the location of other photos

My father, Robert John Kapple, often talked about a house he lived in that was once a Catholic Church rectory. It was moved away from the church to another lot away from the church long before they bought the house. It was moved using a team of horses. My father was born in 1933 in Chicago. My father died in 1990 when I was in my 20's. Unfortunately I didn't ask him where he lived when his family was living around the south Chicago Pullman area before coming to California. After hearing so much about how nice the house was and its history I was curious and wanted to see a photo of it. Once Google street view became available I knew if I had a street address I could find it on street view. 

When I began my genealogy research on my father's family in the late 1990's I discovered my father's parents were living in a two story house which was actually two apartments one upstairs and the other downstairs. My father's parents lived downstairs with their children and my father's paternal grandparents Frank Kappel and Mary Kurta lived upstairs. I knew this wasn't the house he referred to as the former rectory. I had an address of this house from my father's birth certificate, however, and was able to get a photo from the Cook County Assessor's website. 

At some point the family moved into the rectory house but I didn't know when?

When the 1940 US Census became available I found a new address for my father's family. The new address was 12038 Normal Avenue. When I checked Google street view I was disappointed to find that the address was now a vacant lot. It didn't seem like a big enough lot for the large house my father described as the former rectory? 

 A few years ago a 1rst cousin and an uncle shared some old family photos with me and one of them was of the house below. I thought that the house in this photo could be the house my father talked about? It definitely wouldn't have fit on the empty lot in the street view above. I couldn't reconcile the images.  

Looking at the other old family photos I noticed the Kapple children in photos with houses in the background. I wondered if they were taken on Normal avenue? 

When I the checked street view these houses were not on the same street. I decided to check Google street view to see if I could locate houses that looked like these. I began checking around the church and school the family attended. I immediately found similar houses not far from the church on 118th Street (I had noticed my family often chose to live near a Catholic church because the Kapple children attended parochial school).

 

I noticed there was a hint to the location of one of the photos because there was an old two story brick apartment building on a corner in the distance. There was what appeared to be a building with a large pitched roof next to this building. 

Looking at Google street view I felt I had a match for this location. Unfortunately the church steeple was just out of the range of the photo above. 

I then found another family photo showing the same buildings in the distance. Unfortunately the steeple of the church was obscured by a tree. 

I then looked at the houses around the location where the photos were taken. I found one that looked promising for the rectory house my father talked about. When I saw the brick house on a corner across from the houses in the photos I remembered my father said the house was on a corner lot. 

Looking at the house from another direction I noticed it could have appeared in another old family photo. 

It appears to be the same house in this family photo below. The backstairs are now enclosed however. 

I certainly felt like I found the correct house but did I? I needed to find something connecting my family with that address. I knew I couldn't use the 1940 Census to confirm the address because that was the Normal avenue previous house. Apparently after WWII started and my grandparents had steady work they were able to buy a larger home for their family of 7. Also this would allow my great-grandmother Mary Mullen-Mason to have her own space and live with the family because it looks like this house was divided into apartments like the Forest Avenue house. 

I couldn't find any city directories online for Chicago for the time after the 1940 Census. I did manage to find phonebooks for Chicago online. I had to search through a number of years before I found my grandmother listed in the phonebook in 1946. Before that year the family probably didn't have a phone. Apparently my grandparents had already separated by then and my grandmother lived in the house with her children and her mother. 

I was happy to see the address in the phonebook confirmed that I had found the right house.

At first I wasn't sure the photo of the house I had was the same house as the brick house on 118th street? The house in street view looked smaller. Examining it more closely it's the same house. It's nice to have a positive identification of the photo and an exact address. 

 

I was able to get more details about the house at the Cook County Assessors website. The house is 122 years old and 2,394 sq ft. 

I was also able to find the location of this family school photo using Google street view.

St. Catherine of Genoa was actually the closest parochial school to the house at 737 118th St. It was a short walk from the house.

 It's had some remodeling since the photo was taken in the 1940's 

I was able to identify the location of some photos taken on Normal avenue based on Google street view comparisons. One of these photos looks like it was taken in the back of the Normal house, and the other on the side. My aunt Margaret and uncle Tommy are in one of these photos with their grandmother Helen Mullen-Mason. All of the Kapple 7 children are in the other. 

This photo of my aunt Margaret was taken inside the house on Normal Avenue. The house across the street has been remodeled but it's most likely the house seen outside the window.

 

I checked the Newspapers.com website for the family addresses. I only found a couple classified ads for the sale of the house in the 1950's. I couldn't find any ad for the sale of the property by my grandparents. In 1940 they said they owned the house. If I knew exactly when both houses sold I might be able to find an ad? 

Suburbanite_Economist_Wed__Oct_15__1952_

That was a fun journey around the Pullman area of South Chicago. I probably could have gotten more help in locating the properties from my aunts but where is the sport in that?