Two stories of foundlings, families, and DNA genealogy
January 2, 2019 3:08 PM   Subscribe

Anthea Ring was found under a blackberry bush on the South Downs in England in 1937. Sharon Elliott, the 'hatbox baby', was found in the Arizona desert in 1931. Both women wanted to know where they came from.

For those of us who get AZCentral's 'EU Experience', you can read the second link in separate chapters here: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
posted by Catseye (10 comments total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
Good lord, does that AZCentral story drag on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. I am currently reading three paragraphs about the educational history of the woman who would help Sharon Elliott interpret her DNA results. The woman started out majoring in home economics, but then she switched to business, and finally to engineering. This is sort of relevant because she became interested in computers while working at American Express, first in reservations and card services and then in collections. Thiat's important because.... it's not important. I think this guy must be getting paid by the word, and he's going to wring every possible word out of this story that he can.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 4:52 PM on January 2, 2019 [20 favorites]


The answer is basically: you can find the parents, but not the stories of why, which is what people wanted to know in the first place.
posted by corb at 4:57 PM on January 2, 2019 [14 favorites]


It also seems gratuitously shitty to tell everyone that Sharon Elliott's daughter couldn't afford a funeral for her, so the author paid for it himself. You just do the nice thing, you asshole, because you care about this woman or because you clearly spent decades milking her story for columns. You don't humiliate her family by revealing their poverty.

That story made me mad. I think the paper invested a ton of money and time into it, and they felt like they needed to justify their investment. There is a perfectly good piece hidden in there, and it's about 10% as long as the piece that they published.

So anyway, if anyone doesn't want to read the whole thing: they used DNA to figure out who Sharon's parents were, and they were a couple from Iowa who were married at the time of Sharon's birth. Nobody knows why Sharon got dumped in a hatbox in Arizona. The author speculates that the whole thing was a set-up: there was a deal between Sharon's adoptive parents and the Iowa couple, probably facilitated by some Arizona relatives of the Iowa parents, and they came up with the hatbox story together. But there's no real evidence for that, and the whole thing remains a mystery.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:27 PM on January 2, 2019 [16 favorites]


There was a lot of not-strictly-necessary detail in the Hatbox Baby story, but personally I couldn't help but find it compelling. The process of the investigation is just as fascinating to me as the end results - of course, that's easy for me to say because I'm not personally involved. Human life is messy and complicated and often difficult to neatly categorize, and I felt that in the story as written.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:09 PM on January 2, 2019 [5 favorites]


The syntax of the subheading on that second link is really bothering me (emphasis mine):
Sharon Elliott, dubbed the 'Hatbox Baby,' wondered who her parents were and why she was left in the Arizona desert for 30 years.
posted by duffell at 7:40 AM on January 3, 2019 [6 favorites]


The BBC blackberry story is a lot more straightforwardly written and I'd recommend reading that at least. Interesting that there's a suggestion that possibly in both cases it was part of an adoption scheme.
posted by tavella at 8:18 AM on January 3, 2019 [1 favorite]


The DNA genealogy explanation was really interesting (and helpful, since I need to start doing something similar with my tree) but I agree that the part about paying (with the help of two other people) for Sharon's cremation and urn -- something that costs less than $1000 -- is really fucking tacky.
posted by elsietheeel at 8:27 AM on January 3, 2019 [3 favorites]


At the end of the first story there's a link to another story in which the DNA genealogist mentioned in the first story helps a man abandoned in London in 1943 find a bunch of siblings.
posted by mareli at 10:29 AM on January 3, 2019


" I think this guy must be getting paid by the word, and he's going to wring every possible word out of this story that he can."

And the publication can't afford an editor. Not a great combination.
posted by el io at 1:23 PM on January 3, 2019 [1 favorite]


I have noticed in my own DNA/geneological research that, as the BBC article notes, when there is intermarriage, the DNA website can predict a closer relationship than actually exists. For instance, the site may predict a forth cousin relationship, but if I look at the genealogy, there are actually a couple of 8th to 10th cousin relationships. (I have a couple of well-researched lines so with familysearch I use feature that shows the part of the tree with the relationship relationship to a given relative.)
posted by larrybob at 9:19 PM on January 4, 2019 [2 favorites]


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