DNA can’t lie.
In 2022 ancestry.com posted a previously unknown DNA match for our family. According to ancestry, this matched person was a second cousin of myself, my sister, my mother and her siblings. Interestingly, this person also matches the children and grandchildren of Jack Jr. – my mother’s cousins. Her name is Pegeen.
For her to “read” as a second cousin of all Southfords, she must be related to Jack Southford directly within a short number of moves up and down her family tree. There is an unquestionable linkage between the living Southfords and Pegeen, and Jack must be found along it (or directly adjacent to it through a sibling). We share ~200 cM of DNA with her; that’s about six hops up and down the tree.
Imagine a chain with six links, each link a person in the family tree. We might lay the chain up one branch and down five, or up five and down one, or up three then back down again. In each case we end up with similar evidence of shared DNA. Apply this chain to Pegeen’s family tree and we must necessicarly discover the connection or at worst a direct relative like a sibling. Through a process of elimination we will discover the missing link. Our quarry is a male relative born near 1885 capable of being in Charleston in 1915 and again in 1919. Fortunately Pegeen is from a well documented family. The data exists.
We cast a net.
To land in the appropriate timeframe we are looking for Jack in the generation of Pegeen’s grandparents. Her father William was born in 1914 in the same generation as Jack Jr. (1916) and Jennie Southford (1920). The target could lay directly adjacent to the bend of our chain through a sibling with close DNA overlap. We have a limited pool of potential Jacks further limited by circumstance. William can’t be Jack because he is too young. Her mother is not Jack for obvious similar reasons.
Pegeen was born in 1940 in Cleveland Ohio. She is the daughter of William LeRoy Packwood and Ester Gruwunde. William LeRoy left when she was young, leaving her and her brother to be raised alone by their mother alongside other children listed as “boarders” in the 1950 census. Ester lists her employment as “boarding children”. Pegeen’s brother, Terry, passed on in 2018 after his own tumultuous struggle with this life.
William LeRoy remaried in 1947 and drifted east to Ilion, New York where he worked for a small industrial plant for the rest of his life, merging with the infinite in 1986. His last recorded address is a PO Box for the now defunct “Compassion Home of Herkimer Co.”
Ester’s father, Fred Gruwunde, is a prime suspect to have been Jack. He was the right age and sex and was in one of the most likely positions on our DNA chain. He and his wife Marie Wohan immigrated from Germany and there is the rub – Jack had no german accent and contributed no German DNA. If he had a secret twin brother the same would be true. A second clue is that Fred Sr. settled in Cleveland and had an incredibly quiet life as a saloon keeper. His character seems content to fade into the hedges. We should all be so fortunate.
On the Packwood side we encounter a handful of candidates too young or too dead to qualify, and most directly Pegeen’s grandfather Rex William Packwood.
A train wreck of a man.
Twice married with a different address each year in four different cities, always in the red light district, and in the papers most notoriously vamoosing. An elite barber, he also necessicarily mastered the art of riding the rail between Cleveland, Omaha, and Ottumwa. In 1917 he has addresses of employment in both Ottumwa and Cleveland, some 650 miles apart by train.
He fits the profile of Jack dead on.
In 1924 he died of tuberculosis and was buried without a headstone.
Destitute and broken.
Pegeen is a DNA relative of Jack Southford, whoever he really was. Rex Packwood did have brothers who could have been Jack, but they both died too early to have fathered both Jack Jr. and Jennie. Our DNA chain does not reach much further. Rex Packwood and Fred Gruwunde are the two most likely candidates to have been Jack, according to the DNA evidence, which is infallible.
There is no record of Rex travelling to Charleston, and there is no obvious reason for him to have done so. There is no hint as to why he might take an assumed name except that of general scoundrelism. He could have been hiding out from gangsters, scouting out a port for smuggling, or just on a swindlers vacation.
If Rex is not Jack, and this conclusion is in error – then the true story must be exponentially more absurd.
Jack Southford 