Rosa's Cow

Growing up, I heard two "main" story-lines about my grandmother, Rose (Rosa) Cornelia Matthews Marotto. The first was about her having sold her cow to move north.

The story goes that she wanted to move north to become a nurse, but her grandfather wouldn't give her the money, so she sold her cow to afford to move from North Carolina to New York.

The other story was about the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution). My mother attended a DAR tea with a friend of hers and was sooo impressed with how lovely it all was (white gloves and all). My grandmother, Rose, told my Mom "You could belong to the DAR too. We have ancestors who fought in the revolution." More on this later... I will write on how I finally found the connection that allowed us to become members of the DAR. But on with the story of Rose's Cow....

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I headed to my favorite resource, Ancestry.com, and started digging. According to the 1930 Census, Rosa was living at home at the age of 18 (her younger sister, Hettibelle had already, at the age of 16 years, married and moved out.) That was another story....

 that Hettie Belle had married the man Rose wanted, Claudie Rose. But then her name would have been Rose Rose. At any rate, at the time of the 1930 Census, Rose was still living with her parents in Roanoke Township, North Carolina (street address: Jackson and Gum Fork Road). Our next touchpoint is the 1940 Census where Rose shows up as married with 2 children.

The story gets a little more interesting when we add in my DNA results. Turns out I found two people, who I had never heard of before. They each showed up as a "close relative" of mine. Not understanding how such a thing was possible, I started to dig a little deeper into the tree of this "close relative." I looked at the tree that was posted online to try to find some family connection, but there was nothing. 

Finding no connection except that Robert Sandman was born in New Jersey, I took a leap and reached out via email to Robert's daughter to ask if her father was adopted and she said Yes! That her father found out after his mother's funeral that he was not her biological son. So, he lived his whole life not knowing, and when he did find out, the one person who could have given him information, had passed away. Robyn and Robert searched all over New Jersey to find a birth certificate, but there wasn't one. They only found his birth recorded in a registration book. So, we don't have any "paper proof" that would stand up to scrutiny, but we have the DNA results, the interesting timing of Rose's move north and the timing of Robert's birth.

So, Is that why her grandfather wouldn't give her money to come North, because she was already pregnant with Robert? We don't have any way of knowing the truth, but what an interesting story DNA can tell us!