Years of research and DNA analysis have helped me find the identity of my great-great grandfather.
This is the first of a series of blogs about finding my great-great-grandfather, the dad of my great-grandmother, Agnes Florence Thornton Saxton. These blogs contain old images, maps, formulas, and charts. Although I’ve made an effort to optimize them for mobile devices, they are much easier to see in desktop mode.
My great-grandmother was illegitimate, raised in a foster home, and born before birth certificates, but I have found her dad. With no record of my connection to my great-great-grandfather’s family, I have discovered who he was with the help of DNA and statistical analysis.
His name was John Gruard McCaskey, and he was a self-made millionaire by the time he was 30. After years of successful ventures in the oil and sauerkraut businesses, he died at his desk at the age of 49. John married and had five children with his wife, but she died in a car crash a few years before his death. So, after her death, he set up a trust to take care of his brother, sister, and kids—but not his illegitimate daughter—after his death. The trust was funded with the equivalent of more than $56 million today.
It is an incredible story and not the one I expected when I started looking for my great-grandmother’s dad. Agnes Saxton was born July 22, 1896, in Cleveland, Ohio, as Agnes Florence Thornton. She would be 128 in 2024. Her mother, Sarah “Sadie” Eccles Lewis, gave birth to her in a home for unwed mothers. Agnes went to live with another family almost immediately after her birth. Another man, Matthew Stevenson, was said to be her father. I wish I knew when that rumor started, and if Agnes knew more about her past than she told her kids. My stories come from them, and especially my grandfather and his sister, Dorothy. But he was not. DNA results proved that I was not related to other known descendants in the Stevenson family. It was hard for me to find out that he was not my great-great-grandfather because my first name came from his.
Sycamore Roots
Nevertheless, this is a story that keeps getting better. Among other things, my great-great-grandfather has his own Wikipedia page. Meanwhile, there are some surprising similarities between him and the rest of the family. For example, his grandson—my grandfather, Donald Dean Saxton Sr.—was a mining engineer who also traveled the world in search of coal, as mentioned in his news obituary that ran in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He, too, was a self-made millionaire by the time he was 30. It seems like the bulldog tenacity that my grandfather inherited may have come from John. We even look like him, and especially my dad.
John and Sadie grew up together just off Sycamore Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Mount Washington neighborhood, so it’s not hard to imagine how they met. But I have a lot of questions to which I will never have answers. Why didn’t John and Sadie get married? Did John know that he had fathered a child? Was there a good reason that Matthew Stevenson was thought to be the father, or was he never thought to be the dad in the first place? Was that a fantasy caught in family lore?
Questions like these demonstrate how little I know about either Sadie or John. But I’ll tell you what I have found in the available data.
Bleeding Black & Gold
It was the fall of 1895 when Sadie got pregnant. That was the golden era of industrialization for Pittsburgh. In October 1895, factories and labs by Carnegie, Frick, Westinghouse, and Heinz were all in their prime days of production. Mellon Bank was bringing finance to the city, and the Duquesne Country and Athletic Club started playing professional football at Exposition Park. It wasn’t all perfect. The city lost its “h” for 15 years starting in 1891. And the team colors were black and red, not black and gold. But Pittsburgh was a bustling center of activity as people poured in from European countries to work at one of the many mills.
Sadie’s dad, Joseph E. Lewis, was at the heart of it all. He worked as a clerk for the city of Pittsburgh and would become the city’s controller just a few years after Agnes was born. Sadie’s mom was Sophia Eccles, who had roots in Allegheny County back to its frontier days. Sadie was born Feb. 8, 1877, in Pittsburgh. She had many siblings: brothers James, Robert, Joseph, Mark, and Carter; and sisters Jean, Mary, and Sophia. The family attended a Presbyterian church on Bailey Street. After Agnes was born, Sadie married Andrew Weber. According to Pennsylvania corporation records and U.S. census data, he and a partner owned a small manufacturing firm called Weber & Litten. They made steel products, such as wheelbarrows.
Meanwhile, John G. was born on July 3, 1874, also in Pittsburgh. He was the younger son of John W. McCaskey and Sara Richardson. The census has John W. listed as a merchant, and I understand that he ran a store near the corner of Bertha Street and Sycamore Avenue. Church records show that John G. married in the Episcopal church. Like the Lewis and Eccles families, both the McCaskey and Richardson families had historic ties to Allegheny County. John G. had a brother, William, and a sister, Mary.
An Unwanted Child
Sadie was just 19 when my great-grandmother was born, while John was merely 22. For whatever reason, they didn’t get married. Illegitimacy was not just a sin, but it was also illegal in 1896. Children of illegitimate parents were not entitled to the same rights as those born on the right side of the bed. That wouldn’t change for about another 70 years in the United States. Eventually, the Supreme Court ruled in Levy v. Louisiana that states could not discriminate against illegitimate children to discourage births out of wedlock. But in 1896, Sadie was taken out of Pittsburgh to have her baby.
Sadie’s pregnancy might have been hidden from much of the world, but people were working on my great-grandmother’s birth long before she arrived. One of them was Dr. James Potts, who was the physician for the Lewis family and lived just a couple of blocks from them on Shiloh Street. According to family legend, he was concerned about Sadie and her unborn child. The atmosphere in Pittsburgh was dark, and not just from the smoke billowing out of mills. No one wanted the child, and Dr. Potts began to fear for their safety.
Dr. Potts had a brother, Jerome, who lived with his wife, Elizabeth, in a small village in Washington County. They were an older couple who were never able to have children of their own. So, according to family legend, Dr. Potts asked his brother and sister-in-law to take in Sadie’s baby. They agreed. After she was born, Dr. Potts named the baby Agnes Florence Thornton. Sadie chose the name Agnes. Florence came from the village of Florence, where the Potts had their home. Thornton was a made-up name the doctor used to conceal her identity. Her mom saw her only once after they left Cleveland, and Agnes was still a baby at the time.
A Cover Up?
My grandfather believed he was a Stevenson all his life. He was proud of his Stevenson genes and often bragged that he was going to live “to be 100” because he was part Stevenson. I also believed that Matthew was my great-great-grandfather and didn’t have a reason to question that. My primary reason for getting a DNA test was to search my mom’s line, not my dad’s. So, I was surprised when I didn’t match with known descendants along the Stevenson line.
Matthew Stevenson was the half-brother of Elizabeth Potts, so she was a Stevenson by birth. The family knew that, and my grandaunt Dorothy Saxton Dusa recorded it in a story that I edited nearly a year ago. But aside from the family story, I don’t have evidence that he and Sadie knew each other. Matthew did live on Shiloh Street across from his half-sister’s brother-in-law, Dr. Potts. But Matthew was a 37-year-old attorney who had recently been divorced. There are all kinds of possibilities. Was there a cover-up?
What Might Have Been
Which brings me back to the point I made earlier. I still have more questions than I have answers, and I always will. Finding out that I’m a McCaskey and not a Stevenson has led me to wonder what might have been different if John and Sadie had kept Agnes. My great-grandmother had a hard life. She and my great-grandfather, George Dean Saxton, were high-school sweethearts who married when she was only 18. In her late teens, Agnes also developed rheumatic fever and was crippled from it. According to Dorothy’s story, she taught herself how to walk again while raising kids on her in-laws’ farm in rural Washington County. Meanwhile, her dad was making a fortune and raising his other kids in luxury. However, Agnes was 27, had been married for 10 years, and was raising three kids of her own when John died on Jan. 12, 1924.
That is the only thing that bothers me about him. If John knew that Agnes was his daughter and he specifically left her out of his trust, then John was a jerk. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, though, because he was also very protective of his other daughters. His trust specifically includes language that prohibits the future husbands of his daughters from having control over the trust funds.
While I’m relieved to have an answer, I’m also glad that my grandfather didn’t know about John. Things might have been very different for him. He had to work to make his money, and he might not have worked if the money had been given to him. I like the way things turned out.
Connecting the Dots
I never knew Agnes. She died Aug. 23, 1973, at age 77. That was 3 1/2 years before I was born. And yet, inheriting her DNA has proven to be one of the more exciting discoveries of my life. In another blog post, I explained how I found her dad, and in another, I explained the statistics behind the DNA analysis.
Find the entire series here: Tracing the McCaskey Line
View Matt Saxton’s family tree here on Ancestry.
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