From Brick Wall to Beautiful Mosaic….Pieces falling into place!

Alonzo Sedlock

 I have always heard about “breaking down brick walls” which sounds great, but then in reality if you break down a brick wall you have lots of pieces of brick and mortar strewn about. That seems like a big mess. And in my case, it has been! But then, I never thought beyond this image of a mess. What happens to all of the pieces? 

Well, after last night and today, I know what lays beyond this messy yard…it turns out that all of those little brick pieces get recombined into a beautiful mosaic!

A New Cousin

Yesterday, I began correspondence with a cousin that matched with my sister only 8 cM. For people not well-versed in DNA, this is barely connected, it could technically be as close as 3rd cousins, but it is more likely to be 7th cousins or farther (on average you will match 14 cM with a 7th cousin).

(From: https://pngtree.com/freepng/the-brick-wall-breaks-through_8413483.html)

Image from DNAPainter Shared cM Project by Blaine Bettinger, 2000

Why did he reach out to me? Well, it turns out that when I broke through my brick wall of Alonzo Sedlock and added two more generations to my tree three weeks ago in Salt Lake (remember the Slovakian baptisms, marriages, and deaths I found extending beyond my Alonzo Sedlock brick wall?), a name jumped out to him…Kerekes!

We talked for 2.5 hours (!!!) comparing notes and learning about his family tree and we could have talked for several more! His paternal grandparents were both Hungarian/Slovakian and he has a rich history of researching the area and could pronounce all of the town names and even knew how close they were to one another. He is also a professional researcher (not genealogy, but court/records), so he knows where to quickly look to find things. 

During the call, we were able to piece together how we are related, turns out that we are 5th cousins 1x removed (5C1R) through the common couple, Georgius Kerekes (1754-1810) and Maria Fedor (1759-?) and he helped me to find the connections for several other DNA matches that I hadn’t been able to figure out.

Let's go back to how I began chipping away at the brick wall.

Pieces of the Puzzle

Piece #1: My father knew that Alonzo Sedlock’s mother’s name was Elizabeth Kristof Barath. This has always been a stumbling block for me because where did the Sedlock come from? And why the Barath? And was Kristof a maiden name or another marriage? I had so many questions!

Piece #2: About 7 years ago, I came across Alonzo’s WW2 Draft Registration and he listed Stephen Leonard Barath as a brother! Okay, he had (presumably) a half-brother and Elizabeth married a man with the last name of Barath.

Piece #3: About 5 years ago, a genealogy angel posted on Elisabeth’s Find-a-grave site her obituary!! Imagine my surprise when I found out that Elisabeth had 3 children and Alonzo had a full-older sister, Eleanor Sedlock. It also said that she came to the US 30 years prior (~1889) and that she was the daughter of “Mr. and Mrs. John Kristoff”. Equipped with Elisabeth’s death date and location, I then found her will, which also named her estranged husband, Gabriel Barath. But still, where does the Sedlock come in?

Piece #4: Over the past 5 years, with DNA, I have found 10 people who are all related to a Frank Christoff in Clearfield County, PA and who share DNA with my dad ranging from 38 cM to 102 cM. The colorized photo is Frank’s family in around 1901. Frank and his wife had 10 children and I have identified descendants for 6 of these children that share DNA with my dad. 

Frank Christoff and Susanna Hajnal and children, ~1901

Piece #5: According to the Ancestry Trees out there, Frank was born in 1849 in Hungary to a Stephen Peter Kiss Christoff (1832-1902) and Maria Hajnal (1835-1913). They had no children identified that were born in 1855, so maybe Frank was Elizabeth’s brother and these were her parents? But if so, why didn’t she live in Clearfield with ALL of the other children? And if Frank is their son, why was the next child born in 1856 and every other child after was born in 2-3 year intervals? And was Maria really just 14 when Frank was born, that was young for them even at that time?

Piece #6: DNA is powerful and it is also tricky! There are so many possibilities and with “close” DNA there are still lots of possibilities. (I’ve shown here a wonderful tool from DNAPainter in which you input the cM match and it spits out the likelihood for the type of relationship.) 

Piece #7: DNAPainter also has another amazing tool called WATO (What are the odds?). For this tool, you enter in a family tree and include the cM for each relative you know in the tree. It produces various hypotheses and calculates the Odds for each. So, in this case, I entered in Frank and all of his children and the 10 people with their cM that match my dad. I then add in my great-great-grandmother through my grandmother on the tree somewhere and it spits out a tree with all of the possible locations for where my DAD would be placed. The most likely option isn’t always the best, but that’s where you use genealogy to discount some of the possibilities. You don’t need to actually read this graphic, I just wanted to show you the tree and the tan rectangles are the known cousins with their DNA fit into the tree. The blue rectangles are all of the possibilities for where my dad “could” fall and the little green bit has a number that shows the ODDS. The larger the number the more likely the outcome. I have put a rectangle around the 4 most likely outcomes with the red arrow pointing to it.  These 4 paths rely on Elisabeth being a full-sister with Frank.

Brick Wall Busters: In Salt Lake, 

• I managed to find Stephen Kiss Kristoff and Maria Hajnal’s marriage record. They were married Jan 15, 1855, six years after Frank was born and just over a year before their first child, Stephen. 

• I found the baptismal records for all but one of their children and for that child, I found her marriage record which names Stephen and Maria as her parents. 

• I found the baptismal record for “my” Elisabeth which names her parents, Janos Kristof and Theresia Kotsis. Her parents were married November 25, 1839 and their first of six children (I found) was born 1841. There were NO Frank’s (Ferenc)  among the children but there was a Istvan (Steven) who was baptized May 18, 1849.

• I wrote down every single Kristof baptism and marriage I could find at this church for about 50 years…this is a lot and a lot of little paper sheets (each sheet is a couple and their children) In all of the baptisms, I found ONE Ferencz and he was born in 1843.

The Mosaic..putting the pieces back together

My new cousin was intrigued and he was in agreement with my emerging theory…Frank’s given name was not Frank, it was Istvan and that he is the brother to my Elisabeth.

So what did he do? He found the death certificate for a Steven Christoff in Clearfield County, PA! The birth date lines up with BOTH Istvan (Elisabeth’s brother) and Frank Christoff. The death date mirror’s the death date that the Ancestry trees have for Frank. The parents listed are “J?o Christoff” and “Tressa Cortosaf”. Which seems consistent with Janos (John) Kristof and Theresia Kotsis.

This morning I did a search of all of the probates/wills/death certificates for Clearfield County in an around the 1919 date. I found NO Frank Christoff’s but I did find the index to Frank’s wife’s estate in 1920. It is not available on-line, so I guess a trip is in order to Clearfield County, PA. This death certificate doesn't prove my theory, I need to somehow show that Steven married Susanna or somewhere that indicates that Steven went by Frank. (Yes, I did look for an obituary and didn't find one for him in the newspapers.)

I did also write a note to Christoff cousin, who still lives in Clearfield who descends from Frank and asked if he or his father recalled if Frank was ever called Steven. He doesn’t know but suggested writing to the Christoff Facebook page. He has an 100 year old great-aunt who might remember something. He also invited me to look him up if I wanted to see where the Frank Christoff’s settled. I'm thinking April might be a good month to go to Clearfield. :)

Here's where the pieces come together. It’s really hard to tell in photos, but don’t you think  that Alonzo looks a lot like his “uncle”, Frank?

Frank is the man sitting

 

Young Alonzo and older Alonzo.