Duffy Genetics - Where did the dark colors go?

In a previous post, I touched on the perplexing concept of Duffy's having dark skin and dark hair, which seems to have been totally lost by my generation.

I found photos hidden away of John James Duffy and Bridget Helena Murphy which may give clues to what happened to the dark skin and dark hair that traditionally belongs to the Duffy clan.

Bridget Helena Murphy and John James Duffy
Iowa City, Iowa

 I am assuming that this photo was taken around the time they were married (1894).  It appears in this photo that Bridget has fair skin and I have another photo where her eyes appear to be light-colored.  In an earlier post, I said that three of Bridget and John's children had fair-colored skin, but I didn't know about that other two as they had died young.  Now a picture has surfaced of young Willie.  As best as I can tell from this photo, he has very pale skin and light-colored eyes.

Willie Duffy
Williamsburg, Iowa

John and Bridget's firstborn, Michael, apparently died on the day he was born.  But from what we can see, the Murphy light-colored genes drowned out the Duffy dark-colored genes in this generation.  And with the next generation, the Kelly genes are mixed in with their red hair and light skin, and the dark is completely gone.

Carney Family Reunion

The Carney family immigrated from Ireland.  Either they didn't all come together, or they didn't keep track of dates very well.  The 1900 census is the first time people were asked to report the year they went to the US.

The father of this Carney family was John Kearney/Carney.  John died in Illinois in 1876.  So he came before that.

• The eldest son, Thomas, died in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1895.  So again not sure when he arrived,
• The second son, Michael, was married in Trenton, New Jersey in 1868 and reported that he came in the US in 1863.
• The third son, Bernard, married in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1870 and reported that he arrived in the US in 1860.
• The fourth son, James Carney, married in 1873 in Chicago, Illinois, and reported that he immigrated from Ireland around 1870.
• The fifth child, and only daughter, Mary, was married in Chicago, Illinois in what appears to have been a joint ceremony with her brother James.  Mary died in 1894.

James met Mary Gibbs, an Irish immigrant,  in Chicago, and they were married.  They had five children while they lived in Chicago.  The first two were twins, John & Margaret.  The twins were either stillborn or died shortly after birth.  The third child was Margaret Marie Carney, my great-grandmother.  James and Mary had two more sons, John James, and Charles.  Although the rest of the family stayed in Illinois, the James Carney family moved to Nebraska between 1885 and 1890.  They bought farmland in Oak Grove Township, Section 27.  Their youngest son Charles died around 1888.  Since Chicago has no record of his death, I assume he died in Nebraska, where they didn't keep vital records.

Their neighbors to the north and west of them in Section 28 was the Enoch Parr family.  The families were joined in September 1896 when James' daughter Maggie married Enoch's son Elmer.  In 1906, Maggie's brother John married Mayme Strangman, who also lived nearby.  John eventually took over his father's farm.  Elmer and Maggie bought land north of the original Parr homestead, and the two remaining Carney siblings stayed close, and their children attended school together.

In going through old family photos, we found many with the Carney siblings' families, but there was one that we couldn't quite sort out.  It appears to have been taken in Nebraska at the Carney farm (by then owned by John & Mayme).  One day I came across the exact same picture on Ancestry! It had been posted by John Hunt.  John said the photograph had been taken when the Carney family had gone to visit the "Nebraska Carneys."  He could identify all the Illinois Carneys in the picture but had been struggling to identify the Nebraska Carneys.    So together, we sorted everybody out, but I had to expand my family tree to cover the details of James Carney's siblings' families.

James Carney's eldest brother, Thomas, apparently never married. The second brother, Michael, married Anna Dunne. Michael and Anna had 6 children: John, Annie, Margaret, Thomas James, Mayme, and William Francis.  The third brother, Bernard, married twice.  He had six children with his first wife Sarah Boyle: Margaret, James John, John F, William J, Thomas B, and Michael Joseph.  He married his second wife, Mrs. Mary Moore Shortell, after Sarah's death when he was 51.  James's sister, Mary, married Thomas Dunne and had two children: William Patrick and Katherine.

So who is in the photo in front of John & Mayme Carney's house in Nebraska?
The family on the far left is Bernard's grandson, Bernard J, his wife Lillian, and their children: Larry, Gerald, Bernice, and baby Murray. Then the next pair over is Michael J & Frances Carney - Bernard's son and Bernard J's parents.  Next to Michael J Carney, along the back row, is Mayme Carney, John Carney, and their son Henry. The rest of the younger adults across the front are Michael and Frances' son Michael F, John and Mayme's daughter Mary Carney, Michael and Francis' daughters: Constance Carney and Marjorie Carney Hunt.

The photo must have been taken around 1940, assuming baby Murray was born in 1938.

Genetics & Genealogy - Or why don't I have black hair and dark skin?

Every now and then, someone asks a question that really makes you stop and think.  The question of the day is why don't I have black hair and dark skin. For those of you who know me, this sounds like an extraordinary question. Growing up, my hair color was variable -- changing from a medium brown to almost blond and back.  And my skin color is on the extreme side of light.   I moved from Seattle to Texas in the dead of winter to go to work for NASA.  My new office mates just stood and stared at me when I first showed up.  When they finally spoke to me, they said they had never seen anyone as "white" as me.  Perhaps they thought I was a ghost!

Recently as part of a genetic research project, I was asked to choose a skin tone that most closely matched my skin tone.  The chart has twenty-one skin tones on a scale from 0.0 to 10.0.
(http://ww2.gedmatch.com:8006/autosomal/skin_pigment_chart.php) The color closet to me was at 9.0.  So really far away from dark skin but not all the way to paper white either.

So maybe you are wondering how such a question would have even come up.  Which brings us back to genetics and family tree.  My maiden name is Duffy. In Gaelic, it would be spelled Ó Dubhthaigh.  Surnames are usually occupations, geographic locations, relation to someone else (son of ...), or colors.  Ó Dubhthaigh is a mix of relationships and color.  Dubth is black or dark.  Various meanings attributed to Ó Dubhthaigh are: "descendant of the dark one," son of dark, dark-skinned, black hair.  Until recently, I just considered this a curious description, since my father has red hair (still strawberry-blond at 82!) and pale skin. His sister was blond.  His older brother did have dark hair but not dark skin.

What happened recently was that I came across a Duffy/Duffey relative living in Iowa, where the Duffy's settled after coming to America.  It turns out that the Duffy/Duffey's that stayed in Iowa have black hair and dark skin.  So how and where did the dark coloring get "lost" in the genetic tree?

My Duffy grandparents have 6 genetically linked grandchildren.  My father only has two siblings; one a Catholic priest and a sister with one biological child. I have four siblings. All 6 of us have light-colored skin, and the darkest hair color is a medium brown.

A recent family shot!

My cousin Mary and my Dad (2014)

My grandfather was one of five children.  Two of his brothers died young, his only sister never married, and his other brother was sterile.  Both my grandfather, Francis Michael, and his brother, John James, were light-skinned when I knew them. There were no color pictures when they were young.  But they appear to have brown hair in this wedding photo.  If any of the children were dark-skinned, it would have had to have been the children who died young.

Jim & Frank Duffy at Frank's wedding

Dr. Francis Michael Duffy

My great-grandfather was the 4th of 10 children born in America of Irish Immigrants who settled in Holbrook, Iowa. I have no pictures of my great-grandfather at all. When my great-grandfather died suddenly after an accident, his family moved first to town (Williamsburg) and later to Omaha, Nebraska, where my grandfather and his brother attended medical school.

My newly discovered relative in Iowa is a descendant of the 7th child of my great-great-grandparents. So why are the Duffy/Duffey's who stayed in Iowa dark-skinned with black hair and our branch is pale-skinned with light hair?  I don't know.  The field of genetics is booming with new data from the explosion of people having DNA tests for genealogical purposes.  Maybe I will find answers one day.

Both my paternal and maternal line supposedly trace back to the Three Collas, the mythical founders of the Kingdom of Airghialla in Northern Ireland, about 4 AD.

If you have had DNA testing done by Ancestry, Family Tree DNA, or 23andme, you can download your DNA results to your computer and then upload it to a free website called GEDmatch.com.  This website has some useful tools related to genetics and your DNA.