Chimney Rocks, Cherokee National Forest,  Del Rio, TN, courtesy of wikimediaCommons

 

A Double Paternity Mystery

I never imagined when I submitted my DNA to Ancestry.com how much time I would subsequently spend helping long-lost cousins solve paternity mysteries. One of my closest matches was Ken, with whom I share 136 cM, but his tree did not appear to have any overlap with mine. I reached out, asking whether this was a mystery he was interested in solving. Ken put me in touch with his daughter Kim who was down for some detective work, and together we have spent months untangling the story of how our families are related.  The names of everyone except Kim and Ken have been changed due to the sensitive subject matter.

Origin of the Mystery

Ken's father was an airman stationed in Sacramento in 1960, who went home to east Tennessee and never returned to the girlfriend and infant son he left behind. Ken was raised by a stepfather he believed to be his biological father until his mother told him the truth years later. We had a name (let's call him Joe Williams) and a location that broadly aligned with the branch of my tree on which we matched (let's call them Forsyth), but we did not have much else.

Kim managed to locate a strong candidate whose name and history matched what we knew of Joe Williams, but apart from living nearby, he did not appear to be related to the Forsyth family in any obvious way. DNA doesn't lie, however, and the amount Ken and I share indicates that we are at least 3rd cousins, if not closer.

DNA Analysis

Kim and I tried making spreadsheets, comparing our shared matches, but the closest we could figure was that we are both most likely descended from Oscar and Louisa Forsyth, my great-great-grandparents. With DNA, negative evidence matters too, and Kim and Ken did not have any matches among the Williams family. They did match with the family of Joe's mother, however. This led to a new hypothesis: What if Joe Williams was also not his father's son?

Historical Analysis 

We scoured perhaps hundreds of documents and newspaper notices, creating a detailed timeline for Joe's mother Eugenia and supposed father Leonard Williams, and also for David Forsyth, the only son of Oscar and Louisa, and brother of my great-grandmother. I also dug into a memoir written by my grandfather about his childhood growing up in east Tennessee which includes details about the Forsyth family not presently available elsewhere.

Here is what we learned: 
Cocke County, Tennessee, where our story takes place, is known as the moonshine capital of the world. When Joe Williams' mother Eugenia was 12, her father was killed for informing on a bootlegging operation, and Eugenia ended up at a boarding school in the next county. It appears she enjoyed the freedom afforded her by academia, and after graduating from high school, she went away to college in Kentucky.

While at college in 1935, Eugenia met and married Charles Holmes, but within a few weeks, she had returned to school and to the use of her maiden name. In 1936, Eugenia graduated from college and returned home to live with her widowed mother. A year later, and one month after giving birth to a boy Eugenia claimed was Charles' son, Charles divorced her, citing a separation of two years as the reason. In all likelihood, Charles's name was a convenient one for Eugenia to give when questioned about her son's paternity, since Charles lived in North Carolina and could not contradict her. It is possible Eugenia's family had not even known of her marriage until she fell pregnant. This first son died at age 15, so there is no way of proving who his father may have been.

In 1939, Eugenia married Leonard Williams, just one month before the birth of her second son, Joe Williams. David Forsyth's family lived nearby at this time. According to my grandfather, David and his father Oscar worked as middlemen for bootleggers, transporting moonshine between distillers and sellers. David owned a grocery store which was likely used as a cover for the operation. Leonard Williams was a bootlegger who did some time in jail in 1950 for operating an illegal still, so perhaps that was how the families knew each other. When Leonard died in 1960, his obituary mentioned his son Joe being stationed at the Air Force base in Sacramento, and named David Forsyth as a pallbearer at Leonard's funeral.

This makes a compelling story, and proves that at the very least, the Forsyth and Williams families shared a close relationship, but it is not proof of a biological connection. To prove our thesis, targeted DNA testing is in order. Joe Williams passed away a few years ago, but he has a surviving sister and a daughter. David Forsyth has two living sons and several grandchildren. It is a sensitive business to broach the topic of a secret sibling, but hopefully one or more of these relatives will be willing to help us put this mystery to rest.

 

Rowan Leinart

 

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Send your stories to m.strickland@skcgs.org

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