Dear Neale1961,
You are amazing.
Mary also had a daughter Harriet. I have followed her line and have several DNA matches.
I have not checked out the sons yet. I tend to go back and forth between lines because I find that I can get tidbits that way that help me understand the family relationships. I also find it a bit more exciting that way.
This has all been so new. This is an entire family that we did not know even existed.
History repeated itself with Eliza. Her husband died in his 30's and she died in her 40's. They were in Bermuda then as Thomas was in the Royal Engineers.
Thomas was a Loxdale. I have a huge amount of DNA matches to the Loxdales on 3 continents.
Lionel Loxdale is the person we believe to be our Grandfather. We have so much evidence but lack a picture. We had signatures to compare but the hand writing expert said that the sample was not big enough to be conclusive but he could only say there were similarities.
I have pictures of his two sisters, brother and half brother but no one seems to have a picture of Lionel.
Lionel's sister Rosina married a Greenslade in Bermuda. I also have many matches with Greenslades.
His other sister was married twice and I have DNA matches with Rhoda's descendants from both marriages.
I communicate with a cousin in Bermuda who lived with her Grandmother Rosina for many years.
The story that I believe to be true is... We know that after they were orphaned, Lionel and his brother (about 8 and 10) left for Halifax with their half brother (20 or 21 or so) when they were orphaned. Lionel married a woman there who was pregnant at the time. They lied about their age. They were 19 and Canadian law said you had to be 21 to get married without parental consent.
Their marriage certificates say they were 21.
Before their daughter was born, Lionel abandoned them and came down to the Boston area. His other sister lived there at the time. I live outside of Boston.
I found a newspaper article in a Halifax newspaper about how Lionel was suppose to get married but the woman smelled a rat and went to Halifax in search of information. She found the minister who married them so she left and went back to Boston.
Apparently Lionel told her the marriage wasn't valid. That may be true but when his wife remarried, it says divorced on the record.
This all happened in the late 1890's. Then Lionel disappeared.
Rosina told her granddaughter that Lionel was killed in the Boer War and don't go looking under rocks.
He ended up in the Lexington/Bedford area and worked on a farm for a few years. This area is famous for a lot of the Revolutionary War. The Shot Heart Round the World as they say.
We think this is where he changed his identity to Charles Henry Davis from Northfield, Vermont. There are reasons for his choice of name and location.
He ended up in Somerville, Massachusetts and met and married my Grandmother.
Neither my Mother nor her 3 sisters were ever told of or met any family.
There is no mention of any family in Charlie's obit. The only personal thing it said about him prior to meeting my Grandmother was that he worked on a farm in Bedford before moving to Somerville.
Meanwhile, his sister Rhoda who lived in Boston, lost her husband and abandoned her infant son to an Asylum for children. She left and lived in England and Bermuda.
I found a missing person's report from 1926 placed by Rhoda in a Boston newspaper that she was looking for her brother Lionel Loxdale who was last seen in Lexington in 1899.
Charlie showed up in Somerville in 1903. He died in 1924.
There are so many things about this story that make me sad. One of the biggest is his daughter Effie who he abandoned. It sounds like she had a good life except for the fact that even though her Mother remarried, she didn't have more children. Effie lived about 2 weeks past her 100th birthday and next of kin was listed as a neighbor. Effie lived about 40 minutes away from our large Irish (and English) family and we would have embraced her.
So without a picture, I am a bit obsessed with DNA matches and knowing the family that two generations did not know existed.
You have given me much work to do here and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
PUKA
