The Mystery of Grammy’s Hidden Heritage

Happy Birthday, Grammy! Our paternal grandmother ‘Grammy’ would be 109 today.  Sadly, she only lived to be 64, passing away in 1980.  Fortunately, she followed our dad from Massachusetts to California in 1962 after my grandfather passed away at just 46.  This made it possible for me and my sister, Stephanie, to grow up with her until her passing—a short 16 years for me and an even shorter 11 years for my sister.  She was a kind and jovial grandmother who loved her Benson & Hedges cigarettes and Highball cocktails (bourbon & ginger ale.)  She would tell us stories and talk with our mom for hours with her thick New England accent and infectious cackle, all while cooking a pot of fish chowder or boiling lobsters.

There was a strong and stoic side to her as well. She was a nurse in Massachusetts but retired to move to California as a widow, where she promptly got a job in electronics assembly and testing at Varian in Palo Alto. She would work there until just a couple of years before her passing.  She never talked about her parents, childhood, or upbringing.  She would, however, tell us kids that we were descendants of Pilgrims, but as children, we were thinking, “Yeah, but isn’t everybody?”  Many years after Grammy’s passing, our mom would tell us that she wasn’t 100% sure, but she thought that our dad’s mom was adopted and that it involved being the illegitimate child of a pastor, which created somewhat of a stir in the community.  Our mom was sure Grammy believed she was somehow related to William Bradford b. 1590, a rather significant passenger on the Mayflower, but that’s all she could remember.

I have been researching our family tree for many years and knew that the 1920 census should show Grammy living with her parents, the Grahams, at age 5; instead, it listed a three-year-old daughter with a different name, Dora Harve or Harne.  Ten years later, Grammy appeared on the 1930 census, living with her parents as an only child at the correct age of 15.  I wouldn’t know if the census takers wrote the age wrong in 1920.  I spent hundreds of hours researching the names Dora Harve/Harne and Marjorie and even plotted them with other relatives onto a Google map, hoping to find a connection.  All to no avail.

I spent even more time building the ancestry trees of close paternal DNA matches, but the problem was that my parents were only children. Hence, I had very few matches on my father’s side that weren’t easily identifiable as a connection to his Shervington ancestors. The closest match I had that looked promising was a first cousin once removed (1C1XR) named Janice; unfortunately, she was adopted too!   However, everything changed early this year when that cousin’s friend, who manages Janice’s Ancestry profile, asked me if I could help her figure out who Janice’s biological father was.  As I began my research, I learned about the Leeds Method of categorizing your DNA matches and a DNA relationship prediction modeling program called What Are the Odds (WATO.) These tools helped me narrow down who Janice’s father might have been!  I am working on a post for that story as well. Look for it soon, if you’re interested.

Using my newfound skills with Leeds and WATO, I figured my grandmother was either born a Haskins or a Bumpus.  I wrote to the Judicial Archives of Massachusetts with this information, and they found her adoption and name change record!  She was born Florence Bradford Haskins! She lived in the orphanage until age 6, when she was adopted by her parents, the Grahams.  Knowing this, I believe Dora, from the 1920 census, was probably a foster child placement.

Now, my research has become more interesting because I learned from the record of a cousin—coincidentally, also a Haskins—who had a child out of wedlock (as a widow) in 1906 that single mothers sometimes used the biological father’s surname as the child’s middle name. In that case, the child’s middle name was Lumbert. I searched the census records and quickly found a young single merchant marine fisherman with that last name who lived a few blocks from my cousin in Nantucket, making him a likely candidate for the father! So, if my great-grandmother (GGM), Julia A. Haskins, gave Grammy the middle name of Bradford, might her biological father be from the famous Bradford clan, making us related to William Bradford, as the family rumor suggests?

To find a Bradford male candidate for my great-grandfather (GGF), I started with building the male Bradford line down from the Pilgrim, William Bradford b.1590. This took hours and, in hindsight, was a waste of time. However, as I got closer to male Bradfords born just before the turn of the century, it became clear that William’s descendants seemingly couldn’t get out of Massachusettes fast enough. Very few stayed near Plymouth.

I turned my attention to Bradfords, born around 1895 and living in Massachusetts. I soon came across Harold Lanman Bradford, born in 1892, which makes him about three years older than my GGM, Julia. He would have been about 23 years old when Grammy was born in 1915. Harold and Julia grew up and lived in Plymouth County, MA. However, Harold lived in Brockton, about an hour north of Wareham.

I started building Harold’s timeline of life events through census records, newspaper clippings, and other documents available on Ancestry.com. I discovered that he moved to Minnesota sometime between 1910 and 1917, leaving the possibility that he was still in Plymouth in 1915.

The real shock came when I read on his WWI draft registration card that his occupation was Pastor and that he worked at a church in Minneapolis! This seems quite a coincidence, as it matches with the family lore.

Harold appears to have led an interesting life, eventually moving to upstate New York to work at the First Spiritualist Church of Lily Dale and becoming a doctor in biopsychology. He married twice and has descendants still living in the region, whom I have contacted for comment and more information.

Next, I started building Harold’s family tree to see if it was connected to any of William’s descendants I had already established. Sure enough, I found that I had already listed his 2nd GGF, Lemuel Bradford b.1788, as a descendant. Establishing William Bradford b.1590 as Harold’s 8th GGF may be easy, but establishing him as our 10th GGF could never be legitimized without a verifiable paper trail. The most we can hope for in this case is to share enough DNA with Harold’s descendants to show that we are close enough in familial relation to support the hypothesis. I will certainly update this story as I get more information!

I am still researching, and The Mayflower Society is collecting documentation and evaluating my application. Still, a cursory look indicates we may have as many as six ancestors and 14 cousins who arrived at Plymouth in 1620!

So, Happy Birthday Grammy! You’ll be happy to know that we heard your story and are doing our best to legitimize the pride you held in your ancestral heritage, even after the adversity you lived through as a child. We cannot imagine what it must have been like to spend the first six years of your life in an orphanage and grow up knowing you were adopted. Just know that what we saw in you was joy and happiness as you spent time with us. We love and miss you greatly!

Skip & Stephanie

How about you? Are you descendants of a Mayflower passenger? Do you have a family mystery? Tell us about it in the comments!