Now we're getting somewhere....maybe? Sigh........

Well, I see it's been 14 months since my last blog post.  It's not that I don't think about doing it.  I just keep getting caught down another rabbit hole in my family tree and working on that instead.  I really should commit to a post a month or something since I really do enjoy this -and- it's yielded some positive results for me.  The most positive is a follow up to my blog of 5 May 2014 regarding my 3rd great grandfather Clarence Perkins.

In that blog comments you'll note that a woman named Denise who is actively searching the Perkins family tree commented several times with a theory, which has taken me (with her help) months to work through.

She sent me this gem from "Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois, by Newton Bateman, LL.D. & Paul Selby, A.M. (1903) in the sketch about Rollin Waite" (Rollin is a descendant of Mary Ann Perkins, daughter of Thomas Harlow Perkins that I have surmised was Clarence's grandfather).

The highlighted section is where Denise was showing me where she got Thomas Harlow Perkins' date of death.  Down near the bottom in the Perkins family bible entries...."Clarence Linden Lathrop, at Fremont, Vt., April 4, 1836".  This matches up quite well with my Clarence but even more when you consider his death certificate listing his parents as William Perkins and Adeline Perkins.  Note that Thomas Harlow Perkins had a daughter Adeline born at Weathersfield, VT Aug 20, 1813.

https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:XFKD-V6J

https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:XFKD-V6F

So Clarence was born a Lathrop and I find a marriage for Adeline Perkins to William Lathrop?  This is looking like an open and shut case - brick wall down!  But alas, why is there a 2nd marriage date, a month before Clarence's birth?  Via familysearch.org I found birth records in Vermont vital records for William and Adeline's children Lucinda, Augusta, John and Darwin between 1830 and 1834 but nothing for Clarence.  To further confuse things, I found the Lathrop family genealogy book  that mentions William's marriages on one page (245) and his children on another (298) and there is no mention of Clarence anywhere.

https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:XFVG-32Z

I posted on the Vermont Genealogy Facebook page to see if anyone could help me figure out why there are 2 marriage records listed for William and Adeline.  I got a response with the original marriage record from Mar 7th, 1830, which shows that whoever trancribed these records got them wrong both times.

So William remarried about a year and a half after Clarence's birth and I see the births of many children after that.  The census records contain Augusta and Darwin (born to Adeline - Lucinda and John died young) so he obviously took those children with him.  Where the hell is Clarence?

Denise suggested to me that I see about getting a yDNA test done on a Perkins descendant.  I'm not at all well-versed on DNA testing yet and the yDNA stuff makes my eyes gloss over -but- it does test something passed only from father to son so if I had a candidate he could at least prove that Clarence was or was not a Perkins.  From my 2014 blog I mentioned I talked with the wife of Jay Perkins in NY.  Their son Danny agreed (thank you Danny!) and Denise contributed toward the cost of the test, with the help of the Perkins group at familytreedna.

The results came back last week.  Danny does not match the Perkins line (of which a fair sample has been collected) AND doesn't match the Lathrop line (which admittedly doesn't have as many samples).  These results leave me scratching my head.  The lack of a match on the Perkins line makes sense if Adeline was his mother but no Lathrop matches possibly rules out William as the father.  Danny matches with 6 tests, with the surnames Ames, Comptin, Rankin and Engelen.  Obviously the disconnect in the male lines could have happened at any generation, but given the points I've laid out it would appear that Adeline was unfaithful to William and Clarence was a result of that.  Yesterday I received an email that solidified to me that Adeline is Clarence's mother:

During my wait to get Danny's test done I decided to tackle the descendants of Thomas Harlow Perkins and add that family to my tree, as somehow they are connected, even if I had to edit relationships at some point.  This email right here is why you research the ancillary branches.  This woman would have been a distant DNA match, which I wouldn't have pursued at all as I would have figured it'd be tough to find the connection.  Because I added them, Ancestry did the work for me and the DNA connection means I was right.

Not sure where to go with things from here but I'm in the middle of adding William Lathrop's children to my tree in the hopes of another DNA match down the road.  If nothing else, a few of them are half-siblings to my ancestor.  Hopefully it doesn't take another 4 years to figure out who Clarence's father was :).