Defeating snow blindness on International Women's Day - how DNA is helping me to solve a 23 year long brick wall in Inverness

Many of you out there will undoubtedly feel my ancestral pain!

I have a three times great grandmother, Jessie Fraser, who came from Inverness, and who for 23 years has been a brick wall in my research. The reason for this is that she committed suicide in 1860 by jumping into the Caledonian Canal at the Bridge of Tomnahurich (pictured below; source: Cook Collection @InvMag, courtesy of AmBaile via @HighlandHistory). The incident occurred following the death of Jessie's daughter in childbirth, with the details of attempts to save her recorded in the Saturday Inverness Advertiser of 12 May 1860:

From census records in 1841 and 1851 I know that Jessie Fraser was born at Inverness between 1814 and 1816, and from the baptisms of her children it is clear that she married David MacGillivray prior to 1837. I have yet to find a marriage record for them, and in her death record (below), her parents' names were omitted, with no information given on any family members, including her husband, as the informant was the procurator fiscal. 

A note in the record also states that she was buried in the yard of Inverness High Church (pictured below), without even the dignity of an undertaker. On a visit to Inverness many years ago I consulted the burial register, and she was not listed within – the suggestion was given to me that she may not have actually been buried within its walls at all, but just outside, such was the supposed scandal of her suicide.

Looking for Frasers in Inverness is like looking for something white in a blizzard, there are plenty of possibilities! But after many years of finding DNA matches to folk with Frasers in Inverness (including one person who has 13 Frasers out of 16 great great grandparents!), a couple of days ago I finally managed to lock on to two separate people via AncestryDNA who connect to a Fraser family in Inverness, and who are both descended from the same Fraser three times great grandparents, with the suggestion that they are both 4th-6th cousin. No other possible lines in their trees connect to me or my father. Crucially, I've also discovered today that one of their shared matches is a person who I emailed just a week ago, who I believe is a first cousin of my grandfather (sharing 294cM with my father, and 138cM with me), on a separate MacFarlane line, and for whom I am awaiting an email confirmation - thankfully, there are not a lot of MacFarlane families in Inverness, the complete opposite of the Fraser situation! My great grandmother Jessie MacFarlane was Jessie Fraser's granddaughter.

From all of this, my working theory now is that my new DNA matches are descended from an older brother of Jessie Fraser, who was a baker, and that she may be from Kirkhill to the west of the city, and I'm happily finding all sorts of circumstantial evidence to help strengthen this up (e.g. the father of the baker was a tailor in Inverness, as was Jessie's husband, and the naming of her children includes names that tally with the family just found). I still have a way to go to prove this conclusively, but at long last, I am confident that I am finally playing in the right Fraser ball park.

Today is International Women's Day, and a chance to celebrate our female ancestors, often hidden behind the records of a historically patriarchal society in Scotland. I've been trying to reclaim Jessie for 23 years from the genealogical obscurity created by the circumstances of her death, I am determined that the story that will be left about her to history will be more than just that of her suicide. Jessie had several children, and was once someone else's child. I have previously solved many genealogical brick walls in my tree in the past thanks to DNA, but if this one delivers, it will be my biggest breakthrough since I started my family history research in 1999.

The moral of the story - if you have yet to take a DNA test for family history research, I would thoroughly recommend that you do! 

(You can find a chapter on how to get started with DNA as a research tool in my book Sharing Your Family History Online - available UK at https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/Sharing-Your-Family-History-Online-Paperback/p/18718, US via https://www.penandswordbooks.com/9781526780294/sharing-your-family-history-online/!)

Chris

Pre-order Tracing Your Belfast Ancestors at https://bit.ly/BelfastAncestors. Also available - Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records, Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.