🌿 Finding Minnie’s Father: How DNA Helped Solve a Family Mystery
New threads revealed through DNA — connecting lives, places, and generations Every family has its quiet questions — stories half-told, details never written down but often wondered about. One such story belongs to Minnie Alious Hookeywin (born 1896 at Bellingen; died 1982 at Newtown) - pictured here. Minnie is not one of my direct ancestors, but she connects to my extended family through marriage. Her mother, Emily Jane Hookeywin , later married Thomas Cahill (known as Carroll ) — the brother of my great-grandmother, Agnes Cahill . From this point forward, he is referred to as Carroll , the name by which he was known to Emily and their family. There is no clear reason for the change of name. Thomas and his relatives continued to be known within the wider Cahill family, so the variation was most likely a simple misunderstanding — perhaps the way his name was heard or recorded after he moved from the Cahill family’s home in the Hunter region to northern New South Wales, where he met an...