Expanded Clusters are a good new genetic genealogy tool at Ancestry.
I am more interested in my children’s maternal side as I know more about the paternal side (me). Here is my children’s mom’s tree:
The top half is polish and the bottom is Irish (Warren), English (Gatley) and French Canadian (Morrow/Tacy/Tessier).
Morrow
As I look at my daughter Heather’s ThruLines, I see this:
That is not very encouraging as it is such a small match. I can try clusters based on Erica, but many of these clusters work on a 20 cM match and Erica only matches by 12 cM. I’ll try to cluster on Erica anyway.
This results in 2 clusters. Not bad.
Therese is probably Erica’s niece. Therese has a larger match to Heather, but no tree.
Going back to the larger cluster, it seems everyone is related:
It seems like there are a lot of holes in this side of the tree:
So perhaps I need the genealogy to find more matches and more matches to support the genealogy. At this point, I am skeptical concerning Mary A Cassion’s surname. I did a surname search under Heather’s DNA match names and got no results.
Morrow Genealogy
The 1880 Census for Lowell seems significant:
Here older brother Dennis Morrow has married Sarah Whalen. But where are Dennis’ parents? He is now the head of the househould with his two younger brothers and a brother-in-law. If I can find the birth record for any of these three brothers, I should have the names of the parents.
I was able to find the Roman Catholic record for Dennis’ marriage:
Both witnesses are on the Whalen side.
Apparently Dennis remarries in 1916:
Here we have the mother of Dennis:
My best reading is Mary A Casson. At any rate, she dies in 1876. Her husband dies in 1879. That explains the 1880 Census above.
I asked Google if Morrow is a French Canadian name:
I find it frustrating that I am not able to find this family in Quebec. According to Dennis, he was born in Quebec:
Here is his brother Joseph:
The death record for Joseph in Providence gives some more information:
Here we have his middle name and a different name for his mother. Also, this indicates that his mother was from Ireland. Here the mother’s name is given as Rose Cassin from what I can tell. Another interesting thing is that Joseph dies of gas poison “probably” accidentaly. The informant is his daughter Nellie Glancy. This death record appears to contradict some of the other records concerning Mary or Rose Cassin.
Here is a stone from St. Patrick’s Cemetery in Lowell, MA:
While looking through Naturalization papers I found a different Joseph Morrow who was naturalized in Maine but from New Brunswick;
This is a possible hint to his last name.
Back to the Cluster
MK on the Heather’s cluster above has a tree with a little over 70,000 people. Here is one branch of his tree:
There is even a Jean- Baptiste in the line. I suspect that Joseph Frederick’s father was a Jean-Baptiste (John B.). Here is Louis from MK’s tree:
Here is another tree for Louis at Ancestry:
Actually, this is a Joseph born around the time I was looking for a John B.
Another thing is, that this match with Erica could be on the Tessier side:
Summary and Conclusions
- I tried to use Heather’s expanded clusters to ferret out some more genealogy on her Morrow side
- I had trouble with the genealogy as it appears the Morrow name could have be Moreau, Morin, Morot, Morault or something else perhaps.
- There was one small match between Erica and Heather of 12 cM. This seems small for a 3rd cousin and JJ did not match Erica at all
- One shared match suggests that the Morrow name could have been Morin. However, the match could also be on the Tessier/Tacy side which is not known to be related to the Morrow side.
- While researching Joseph Morrow I found some interesting details about his death.





























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