Mary Jane King/Moore – My Half Great Grandaunt
52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks
Week 15
This story has had multiple unexpected turns, revealing themselves over a period of seven years.
It began with a group of DNA matches who were uncovering surprises of their own.
When April tested, she and Tracy—who had grown up believing they were full sisters—learned they were actually half-sisters. April shared 142 cM with my mother. Not long after, another match appeared. Cassidy, who shared 198 cM with my mother, had also tested and was soon identified as another half sister.
Then came Angel, sharing 106 cM, revealing yet another half-sister.
One by one, each new test brought an unexpected reveal.
As the evidence developed, it became clear that April, Cassidy, and Angel were all daughters of Walter William Marling.
At one point, I remember thinking that he must have been some sort of sperm donor. Of course, that wasn’t the case—but it did feel like one unexpected child after another was appearing through DNA testing.
At that point, I had not yet identified the parents of my mother’s maternal grandmother, Lucenda, so this growing group of matches immediately caught my attention.
As I began building out the Marling family, I followed what appeared to be a clear line of descent. For a time, everything seemed to fit.
But that assumption did not hold.
Shared DNA matches pointed to another surname: Moses. I reached out to a match named Chase Moses. It took a while to get a response—I followed up every few months—but eventually he replied and told me that his father was actually a Marling.
He suggested I contact his mother, who then gave me the phone number for his grandfather, Johnny Marling, explaining that he was very interested in genealogy.
So I made a cold call.
Johnny shared that as a young man he had gotten two women pregnant around the same time and had been forced to choose between them. One child was raised in his household; the other was not. That decision created a separation in the family that had carried forward for generations.
I encouraged Johnny to take an Ancestry DNA test, and he agreed. When his results came in, they confirmed the connection to Chase—and revealed something more. I was also able to identify a son Johnny had never known.
At that point, I was becoming more convinced that my great-grandmother Lucenda might also be connected to the Marling family.
While building out trees for additional unknown matches, I began to see a pattern. A group of shared matches connected to the surnames Crull and Lent began appearing repeatedly alongside the Marling matches.
One match stood out in particular: N. L., who shared 130 cM with my mother. It took some time, but when her daughter—who managed her DNA—finally responded to my inquiries, she told me that N. L. was a Crull and identified her parents.
With that information, I was able to build her line back to John Franklin Crull, whose parents were Daniel Crull and Elizabeth Lent. Finally, I had a couple that linked the two surname clusters I had been seeing.
And there, in the 1870 census, was their daughter—Lucenda.
When I added that line into my own tree, everything aligned. For the first time, Lucenda had parents.
From there, the pieces began to fall into place.
Because the expected Marling line did not account for the DNA results, I asked Johnny to take a Y-DNA test, expecting the results might point to the Crull or Lent families. They did not. Instead, the results showed a match to the Bousman surname. Combined with a strong autosomal match to a Bousman descendant, this indicated that Johnny’s biological paternal line was Bousman, not Marling. My mother did not have any matches with a Bousman surname, which meant that her connection to the Marling cluster had to come through Johnny’s grandmother, Mary Jane.
It didn’t come together all at once. It came in pieces.
First, there was the match to N. L. Suddenly, Lucenda was no longer just a possibility—she appeared within a network of DNA matches that connected her to a real family.
Then the Y-DNA results made it clear that the Marling line I had been following was not the biological line. That realization forced me to reconsider everything I thought I knew about this branch of the family.
And then came the moment that changed everything. When I discovered that Mary Jane was associated with both the King and Moore surnames, something clicked.
In the 1900 census, Lucenda and her children were recorded under the surname King. Yet in later records, her younger children—including my grandmother—were known by the surname Moore.
This shift in surnames had always been difficult to explain. But now, in light of the DNA evidence, it began to make sense. The changing names were not random—they reflected the complex relationships within this family.
What had once seemed like inconsistencies in the records were now clues. The shifting names, the scattered documents, and the DNA connections all pointed to the same conclusion.
The evidence points to a different biological paternal line for John Edward Marling, Jr., and strongly supports placing Mary Jane King within Lucenda Crull’s immediate family.
Given Mary Jane’s birth about 1890 in Springfield, Missouri, Lucenda’s documented presence in Springfield and later household structure, the most consistent explanation is that Mary Jane was a previously unidentified daughter of Lucenda Jane Crull.
Johnny and I share grandmothers who were half sisters—Mary Jane King/Moore and Elizabeth Moore.
And as with so many genealogical discoveries, each answer has led to new questions—some of which are only just beginning to emerge.
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