Names of living people, some surnames, places, and other identifying characteristics have been altered or redacted to protect the privacy of those I have researched.

“NPE”, which stands for either “Non-Paternity Event” or the less clinical “Not Parent Expected” can be a difficult puzzle to solve for any genealogist. This story includes several of them!

It all started with a green and white cardboard box and a little spit. I had an extra genealogy DNA kit that I had purchased for my daughter’s grandfather, but he declined to relinquish some saliva in the name of history and scientific discovery. The kit went to my daughter’s then-boyfriend, Stephen Simpson, who had a passing interest in his family tree, perhaps brought on by his grandmother’s ill health. Stephen and my daughter are no longer dating, but he is a tall, lanky young man with the vibe of a stoned Sasquatch that is so ubiquitous these days, who cultivates interests in Anime, the zombie apocalypse, and conspiracy theories.

Stephen did have a few questions about his ancestors: First and foremost, his maternal grandmother had died when Stephen’s mother was a toddler, and her family was very close-mouthed about the events that led to her death. His mother had also traveled to Montana to visit her “brothers”, but these brothers did not share his mother’s maiden name and he had never met them or his maternal grandfather. He didn’t even know his maternal grandparents’ names, though he thought his maternal grandfather must have had the surname “Holzappel”, which was his mother’s maiden name. I love a puzzle and was happy to see what I could find. It took a little digging, but I was able to find records to identify Stephen’s grandmother as Connie Jo Holzappel, which was her maiden name, not the name of Stephen’s mother’s father. Then I turned to the newspapers and discovered numerous articles about Connie Jo’s death. It was not a pleasant story. Connie Jo had married Robert Sawyer in Montana in 1971 after Stephen’s mother had been born. When she was just twenty-two years old, her husband of fewer than two months had beaten her to death. At the time, Stephen’s mother was just over a year-and-a-half old.

Though this sad news answered one question, there were others. The brothers that Stephen’s mother had visited were listed on her Facebook page, and were not named Holzappel or Sawyer; their surname was Martin. Though I had found the answer to what happened to Stephen’s maternal grandmother, I still had more work to do to identify his maternal grandfather. As I was following the paper trail to build an extensive family tree, Stephen’s DNA results popped into my inbox. There was a 202 cM match named Sam Martin among the matches, which could indicate that he was a second cousin. This might be the link to the Martin brothers that Stephen’s mother had identified on her Facebook page. I looked at Sam’s family tree and expanded it to try to find the connection. Sam was a great-grandson of Fred Martin, and among Fred’s descendants was Marvin “Tug” Martin, who was born and raised in Montana. A few birth indices and newspaper birth announcements later, and I learned that Tug’s sons were the same as the brothers listed on Stephen’s mother’s Facebook page. I reviewed the DNA results for Sam and Stephen and started checking the math, triangulating the centimorgans in their shared Martin family matches. It was clear that Tug was Stephen’s mother’s biological father, and Sam was Stephen’s second cousin once removed. There were no records to tie Tug and Connie Jo together such as a marriage license or shared address, but it was the ‘60s – make love, not war, and all that jazz. Later records showed that after her mother’s death, Stephen’s mother went to live with Connie Jo’s brother and his new wife in the Pacific Northwest, where she grew up, married, re-married, and raised several children. Robert Sawyer served a long prison term and is still living. He married a much younger woman at the start of his incarceration and now lives in a mobile home in Montana.

As I concluded answering this question for Stephen, a nice hefty 1738 cM match to a Joseph Malmsten popped up in his DNA matches. Ordinarily, this sort of discovery would result in a quick text saying, “Hey Stephen, your uncle is on Ancestry.” But the surname Malmsten was completely unfamiliar and didn’t appear in any of the research I had done. I started exploring this match’s tree and was intrigued by the many Scandinavian surnames and places. Stephen had a high degree of Scandinavian ancestry, including 34% Sweden and 19% Norway that I hadn’t yet been able to account for other than connections a few generations back. Identifying this match might help me figure out where all Stephen’s Swedish and Norwegian DNA came from. The more I researched Joseph the more perplexed I was. I was finding no connections between Joseph’s family tree and Stephen’s. Joseph was working on his family tree as well, and I reached out to him to ask if he had any information to share that could help me to find the source of his DNA match with Stephen, but I didn’t get a reply. He did however post a picture of his father, Lester Malmsten, to his tree and… Wow! Though Joseph was dark-haired with large eyes and sharp features, Lester’s picture looked as if Stephen had shaved, combed his hair, and put a sepia filter on a selfie. And the resemblance to Stephen’s father, Edward, was uncanny as well.

I decided to delve into Joseph’s personal history. He was born in Minnesota to parents who were both of Scandinavian descent. He had served in the Air Force and was stationed at McChord Air Force Base near Tacoma. This is where Stephen’s paternal grandmother was from and where his father was born. One interesting find was a newspaper article from 1962 about Joseph and two other men becoming lost on Mt. Baker during a skiing trip while he was stationed at McChord Air Force Base.

In early 1965, Joseph was living in a bedroom community near the military base and was attending a local university while continuing his military service. He married his wife Julia in the summer of 1965, and they had two sons. In later years, he had a career in the private sector and lived in several other states.

I reviewed the DNA matches, and though there were dozens of shared matches between Joseph Malmsten and Stephen, I could not find a single Simpson in any of Stephen’s DNA matches. Stephen’s grandfather, Jack Simpson had passed away long before I started my research, so Stephen was not able to ask him for any details of his ancestors or heritage. I continued picking at the threads of information to see if I could weave a narrative that fit with the available facts. I had an inkling of what the answer might be, and I started searching for more records referencing Stephen’s paternal grandparents. Jack Simpson was stationed at Fort Lewis in the 1960s and served in the Army. Fort Lewis and McChord Air Force Base are now combined into Joint Base Lewis-McChord. He married his wife, Patricia in 1965. Their son, Edward, was born in late 1965, and with the addition of their younger son Brent in 1972, their family was complete. I had seen pictures of Brent on social media and had noticed that though he looks like Jack, he and Edward don’t resemble one another. According to Stephen, there were a few family jokes about Edward being the milkman’s son, though there didn’t seem to be any seriousness to the humor.

I found that Stephen’s grandmother, Patricia, had been living in an apartment complex just a ten-minute drive from where Joseph was living in early 1965 and that she worked in the registrar’s office at the university that Joseph was attending. This matched the timeline for when Edward would have been conceived. Though I could find no records of a relationship between Joseph and Patricia, as they say on the more salacious daytime talk shows, “DNA don’t lie.” Joseph Malmsten was Edward Simpson’s biological father and Stephen’s grandfather. I messaged Joseph a few more times, never directly questioning if he was Edward’s father (something he might never have known), but asking if he had any ideas about the source of his DNA match with Stephen, if he had friends from his time in the Pacific Northwest with whom he kept in touch, if he had any recollections about his time in the Air Force that he would share, but I never received a response.

I shared my conclusions with Stephen and asked him if he might want to speak with his grandmother about it, but his reaction was unexpected. Instead of acknowledging the possibility that his father wasn’t Jack’s son, he employed some impressive mental gymnastics, theorizing that perhaps Jack and Joseph, both serving in the military at the same time, had participated in a top-secret government experiment that had caused a mutant recombination of their DNA. In the end, he decided not to speak with his family about it, and his grandmother passed away a few months later, taking whatever secrets she kept with her.

This chart shows the relationships described, using the same names as within this article.

About this time, several more distant matches popped up on Stephen’s DNA results, including a person of color named Glenda. Why was this so exciting to me? One of the ulterior motives for my genealogy hobby is a desire to demonstrate that we are all related. We have differences in experience, privilege, politics, abilities, appearance, and geography, but are a single human race. I believe that eliminating the “othering” of those around us can serve to unite our communities. I reached out to this match and started trying to find the connection. It was quite distant, and I was never able to identify the specific shared ancestors, but I was able to find both Glenda’s and Stephen’s ancestors in the same county in Georgia in the 1850s. Stephen’s family were slaveholders, while Glenda’s family were enslaved. Glenda was disappointed, as one of her genealogy goals was to identify her paternal grandfather, and she had hoped that this match would help her find an answer. Family rumor said that this grandfather was not Thomas Trent, who was of African descent and was the father of record, but a kosher butcher from Wilmington, Delaware, where both Thomas and her grandmother Edith were living. A new puzzle to solve? I’m in!

I started by looking at Glenda’s family tree. She had just started it, and only her parents and siblings were listed. I built Glenda’s tree anew, with special attention to her father’s family of origin. Glenda’s father, William Trent, was a remarkable person. He was born in 1927 in Wilmington and was the second of two children. He had left home after his stepfather, Willie Black, had led him into some bad choices, including an arrest for a “street fracas.”

The judge gave William the choice of going to the New Castle County Workhouse or joining the military, and he wisely chose the latter. Wisely, as not only did he have a distinguished and long career in the military, traveling the world while raising a large and accomplished family, but at the workhouse corporal punishment was meted out in the form of whippings while tied to a post, nicknamed “Red Hannah”. This moniker for the whipping post presumably originated because the prisoners would embrace “her” while receiving an allotted number of lashes which were either stipulated by the court or were given for infractions during incarceration. Thomas, William’s father of record, had a penchant for poultry pilfering, and I found several newspaper articles describing him being sentenced to the workhouse and being given lashes as punishment for the chicken thefts for which he was convicted.

After requesting court records which detailed Thomas’ convictions, sentences, and releases, I was able to confirm once and for all that Thomas was not William’s biological father. Thomas was incarcerated and serving a one-year sentence (again for stealing chickens) from early 1926 until just before William was born.

Stealing chickens? Could this be the connection between Thomas, Edith, and the rumored kosher butcher? I looked at the city directories for Wilmington throughout the 1920s and found several kosher butchers, including a few who lived in the very neighborhood where Thomas and Edith were living. I researched several butchers’ ancestors and descendants, and looked for surname matches among Glenda’s DNA matches, but none were to be found. After spinning my wheels researching Wilmington’s Jewish community for quite some time, it occurred to me that the kosher butcher was, after all, only a rumor. Did Glenda have any Ashkenazi or other Jewish heritage apparent in her DNA? I took a step backward and looked at her ethnicity results. There was absolutely no indication of Jewish ancestry, and certainly nothing as close as the 25% percent that someone would expect to inherit from a grandparent. But there was something else: Glenda’s ethnicity estimate showed 22% ancestry from Germanic Europe, which was the highest percentage among her ethnicity estimates. Additionally, she was identified as a descendant of the “Pennsylvania Highlands Settlers”, a group of German and Swiss immigrants who settled in Pennsylvania, particularly the Lancaster County Mennonites.

About this time, two new matches appeared in Glenda’s DNA results: Shannon Paine and Vicky Paine. These were close matches, 407 cM and 357 cM respectively, and they both also had a high percentage of Germanic European ancestry and a connection to the “Pennsylvania Highlands Settlers”, so I was very interested in learning more about them and their heritage. A little research and I was able to determine that Shannon and Vicky were sisters, both of whom were born in Wilmington. I reached out to them while simultaneously building their tree myself and learning more about their ancestors in Wilmington and the surrounding area. Vicky replied to me first and seemed convinced that my message was some sort of scam. I did my best to put her mind at ease and explain my intentions and my interest in her family tree, but she wasn’t willing or able to give me much information. The one thing she did share was her opinion that if any of her ancestors were William’s unknown grandfather, it was her maternal grandfather, Lawrence Hintz. According to Vicky, Lawrence had been quite the ladies man and had left Vicky’s grandmother after, as she put it, “He was untrue to my grandmother.” I reviewed my research, and found that at the time that William was conceived, Lawrence was only about nine years old. Hormone injections or a time machine notwithstanding, Lawrence was not the man we were looking for. Shannon’s tree was much more extensive, and when she replied to me several weeks later, she seemed much more interested in joining our quest.  One of the first comments she made about our puzzle was, “Oh, Glenda looks like a Paine!” Though Shannon didn’t know anything about her family having connections to the Mennonite community or German ancestry and hadn’t uncovered any in her research either, she was happy to provide any information she could. I was sure that the answer had to be somewhere in Lancaster County and the Mennonites. When I looked at the DNA matches that Glenda shared with Shannon, there were scores of Mennonite surnames among the matches and their trees: Leid, Horst, Grabill, Gehman, Weber, Zimmerman, Sensenig, Burkholder, Weaver, Huber… the list went on and on.

The first ancestor of Shannon’s I took a keen interest in was Byron Paine, Shannon’s paternal grandfather. Maybe Shannon’s gut reaction that Glenda looked like a Paine would lead to the answer. Byron was born in Philadelphia in 1905 but had spent most of his life in Wilmington. As a child, he and his sisters were at the center of a landmark custody battle. Accounts vary slightly, but the gist story was this: Byron’s mother, Rebecca, died from tuberculosis when Byron was just two years old. His father, Frank, had cared for them with the help of his mother-in-law, Mary Jane Blythe. But when Frank returned to the house one day with a woman he called his wife and told the children to call her “mamma”, Mary Jane took her leave of the house and returned to the home she had once shared with her husband, John, who had died in 1900. Not long after, Frank (still unmarried despite what he had told his mother-in-law a few years earlier) had left his children in the care of a sister-in-law and her husband, promising to pay for their needs. When he failed to do so, the children were brought to live in Mary Jane’s home. Byron and his sisters lived with their grandmother for quite some time before Frank returned, again in the company of a woman, saying that he intended to get married and wanted his children with him. Mary Jane took him to court, suing for custody of the children and claiming that Frank was an unfit parent. The case was eventually settled out of court and Mary Jane kept the children, all of whom lived with her until adulthood. Newspaper accounts at this time are quite colorful in their descriptions of the legal battle, which was revolutionary for its time as it considered the question of a grandparent’s rights with regard to child custody.

Byron was a young man and unmarried when William was conceived and was still living in his grandmother’s home at the time. He was dating the woman who would eventually become his wife and was working as a carpenter, which was his life-long trade. My interest was piqued when I found that his grandmother’s house was literally just around the corner from where Edith was staying with her aunt while Thomas was at the workhouse in 1926 and 1927. It was just a brief six-minute walk between their homes. I shared this discovery with Shannon, and we theorized that Byron might have been William’s biological father. Shannon reached out to her Uncle Butch, Byron’s son, to see if he had any insight. Butch thought that Byron having a relationship with a woman of color was unlikely and described him as “the original Archie Bunker.” But he was intrigued enough by the idea to send in his DNA to see if we would find a match. Butch also made the insightful comment, “Sometimes the root of bigotry is jealousy or desire.”

Several impatient weeks and a great deal of continuing research later, Glenda, Shannon, and I joked that we should start a pool to see who would guess correctly about the identity of William’s father, but that it wouldn’t be much of a contest as we were all betting on Byron. One thing was still nagging at me though: Byron was of English and Irish descent. He didn’t have the German or Mennonite heritage that I was expecting to find in Glenda’s grandfather. As disappointing as it was, it wasn’t a total shock when Butch’s results came in and he was not a match to Glenda. Back to the drawing board.

I next looked at Shannon’s Hintz ancestors. After all, if Vicky had immediately suspected that her grandfather Lawrence Hintz could be William’s father, then perhaps other men in that family had a similar fondness for the ladies. Records grew sparse after only one more generation, however. Lawrence’s father, Anthony Hoover Hintz, was also a resident of Wilmington during his life, but his roots were in Mifflin County, Pennsylvania. The only record that mentioned his family of origin was on the license for his second marriage, which stated that his parents’ names were Robert Hintz and Hattie. Anthony was born in 1885, and there is a big black hole in Mifflin County records between about 1870 and 1892, which no one at the county or historical society could explain or assist me with. I found several contemporaneous Hintz families living in or near the area, but despite finding dozens of their ancestors and descendants, I was not able to connect them to Anthony. I asked Shannon if she had any additional information about where Anthony’s middle name “Hoover” came from; this surname and its variant Huber are common in the Mennonite community. Maybe this was the connection to the Mennonites that I was looking for. Shannon didn’t know anything about the source of this name, and despite all of my attempts to find out more about Anthony’s family of origin, I was thwarted. But Shannon had a plan: She contacted some of her Hintz first and second cousins and asked them to take DNA tests. She even got one for her mother, Brenda, to see if the key to solving our mystery might be there.

Shannon also had an additional twist to add to the puzzle: One of her cousins who was submitting his DNA, Rolland Hintz, believed that his father Walter Hintz was not his biological father and that his “uncle” Lawrence (Shannon’s grandfather and Walter’s brother) was his biological father. It would be simple to compare Rolland’s DNA to Brenda’s, Shannon’s, and the other cousins to find out of this was true. And once that had been accomplished, we could add it to the triangulation with Glenda’s DNA to identify her grandfather.

The waiting game began anew, and I bided my time by continuing to flesh out additional information on all of the men who could have possibly been William’s father, creating spreadsheets to categorize what different shared DNA results we were anticipating might mean, researching Lancaster County Mennonites, families named Hintz, Hoover, or Huber as well as many other relevant surnames, and reading hundreds of newspaper articles and books mentioning anyone who had even the most tangential relationship to my research. I also built an obsessive number of trees for the closest of Shannon’s and Glenda’s shared DNA matches whether or not they already had publicly available trees, attempting to find that one elusive common ancestor. I had sent Rolland a few messages with questions about his recollections and asking for updates on his DNA results. It was clear from my limited correspondence with him that he was suffering from the infirmities of old age, as in each message he asked who I was or how I knew him, and he would sometimes send me messages that were intended for someone else. He had started and re-started his family tree several times. It was as if he didn’t remember creating it previously, so he was always starting over. Shannon confirmed that Rolland was experiencing some age-related problems and said she would contact him soon to see if she could get an update on his DNA.

Then suddenly – BOOM! – a new match appeared in Glenda’s list: It was Shannon’s mother Brenda! She had a whopping 696 cM match to Glenda, which is in the range of first cousin or half-aunt. We were so close to finding out which Hintz was Glenda’s grandfather and I was dying to get results from the cousins. I didn’t have long to wait. Within just a few days, Rolland replied to my latest message. Bless his heart, he sent me his Ancestry login and password, saying, “Will this help?” Yikes! I replied thanking him and telling him that with his permission I would log in to his account to view his results (if he had even received them, something of which I was not completely sure) and asking him to please change his password.

I logged in to Rolland’s account and I was, in a word, FLUMMOXED. Rolland had indeed received his results, and he was not a match to Glenda. At all. I had been so sure that the brick wall in my investigation of Anthony Hoover Hintz was hiding the Mennonite ancestry I was looking for, but that was not the case.

I did also review Rolland’s results against the other Hintz cousins and Brenda’s test and was able to confirm that he was correct; his “uncle” Lawrence was indeed his biological father. This meant that Lawrence had seduced or otherwise impregnated his brother’s wife when he was only seventeen years old. This certainly seemed to lend some credence to Vicky’s opinion of Lawrence.

At this point, I had added over two-thousand people to Shannon’s branch of the tree alone. I felt like I knew these people and had so many facts and stories rattling around in my head. I had already eliminated her Paine ancestors as well as the branch that included her paternal grandmother when Uncle Butch wasn’t a match. Now the Hintz family was eliminated as well. There was only one branch left: her maternal grandmother’s family, the Coles.

Though I had certainly considered the Cole family in my initial research, since they were of English descent I hadn’t delved as deeply into this line. And I was not finding the surname Cole among the shared matches or their trees. Nonetheless, I took a fresh look at Shannon’s and Brenda’s Cole ancestors. I confirmed that as far back as the records would go, there was no connection to the Mennonites or Germany. Many of the family lines had immigrated to North America from England, and most had lived in Maryland or the Carolinas until the most recent generations. That said, I didn’t have to go very far back to find the answer – and it was a doozy!

Brenda’s maternal grandparents were Caleb and Ada Mae Cole.  Caleb was born in 1884 in Maryland and was an ironworker who built bridges, and later a fitter at the shipyard and a highway foreman. He married Ada Mae when she was just thirteen (though she claimed she was sixteen on their marriage license) and he was twenty-three. They had eleven children, including twins Erle and Dorothy, who were born in 1922. Dorothy later went on to marry Lawrence Hintz and was Brenda’s mother. By all accounts, theirs was a rocky relationship, though there must have been some camaraderie as evidenced by their large brood. In the 1920s they were living in Wilmington, and the unhappy state of their marriage was the topic of newspaper articles, including one describing Ada Mae charging her husband Caleb with breach of the peace.

In the 1920 Census, Caleb and Ada Mae are listed as living on Lobdell Street in Wilmington with their seven eldest children (aged nine years to eight months), Ada Mae’s mother, and boarders Edna and Emily Basders and Nathan Gehman. Wait a minute! Gehman?? That surname was littered throughout the shared matches that Brenda and Shannon had with Glenda. That couldn’t be a coincidence.

I found Nathan in several family trees published by the DNA matches and researched him myself as well. He was born in 1879 to Martin Gehman and Susanna (Grabill) Gehman in Lancaster County. (Grabill was yet another surname that kept popping up in the DNA matches’ trees.) He worked for the railroad, and in 1906 he lost his leg in a railroad accident.

Nathan continued to work for the railroad in the capacity of a towerman and a guard despite the loss of his leg. He was living in Wilmington as early as 1909, and in the Cole household in Wilmington in 1920. He purchased property in Wilmington in 1922 and again in 1924. Was Nathan the missing link to the Lancaster County Mennonites? There was nothing left to do but the math. The theory that was gaining credence in my mind was that Nathan might be the unattributed biological father of more than just William. I triangulated Glenda’s, Shannon’s, and Brenda’s matches with known relatives of Nathan Gehman – over two dozen of them. Each and every one of these cousins had the right amount of shared DNA with Glenda, Shannon, and Brenda to fit my theory. I also ran the same calculations for Nathan’s only brother, Clayton, and the number of centimorgans did not match up with the known and hypothesized relationships. I double-checked Nathan’s father’s records and confirmed that he died in 1893, well before the events I was researching. Lastly, I looked to see if there were any children of record for Nathan and there were not. But just in case, I ran the same calculations on a fictional “Nathan, Jr.” and still, the amount of shared DNA did not match. What did all of this prove? Nathan Gehman was not only William’s father and therefore Glenda’s grandfather, he was also the biological father of the Cole twins, Erle and Dorothy, making Nathan Brenda’s grandfather and Shannon’s great-grandfather. This is why, despite the paper trail, Glenda, Shannon, and Brenda had such a significant connection in their DNA to the “Pennsylvania Highlands Settlers” community and Germanic European ancestry, as well as so many shared DNA matches with deep roots in the Lancaster County Mennonite community. Another puzzle was complete.

This chart shows the relationships described, using the same names as within this article.

No paper trail or DNA can tell us who Nathan really was or can describe the nature of his relationships with Ada Mae or Edith. There is no way to know if Jack knew that Edward wasn’t his biological son. And we will never be privy to the choices or twists of fate that resulted in Connie Jo marrying the man who would take her life. People take their secrets with them when they die. But one thing is certain: With the advent of readily available DNA testing, the ever-improving technology to interpret it, and the growing collections of easily accessible digitized records, the days when one’s ancestors, heritage, and history are unknown and unrecoverable are gone. And even when the truth is painful or shocking, it is still worth knowing. What you do with that truth is completely up to you.