I am no longer updating this page in any significant capacity. The evidence in favor of the Henry hypothesis (below) is now so strong that piling on seems pointless. The number of DNA matches, closing in on the relevant family, has grown to the point of being downright unwieldy to chart.
My great-grandfather Robert Huntington was born in the mid to late 1860s, supposedly in Galveston, Texas, growing up as an orphan. On his marriage and death records, his parents were listed as “John (S.) Huntington” and “Mary (A.) Murphy”; on census records their birthplaces are reported as Virginia and Maine, respectively. His mother is said to have died a week after his birth. However, I can find no record of any such people, and it is possible this information is wrong.
Meanwhile, DNA testing has pointed a different direction, with several matches to people with ancestors from Nova Scotia, particularly Cape Breton, named Huntington.
Below is a family tree of these matches, with the number of segments and number of centimorgans (cM) matching my mother and her sister, where available. The matches in parentheses are from AncestryDNA, which uses different measurement standards, and are thus only roughly comparable. DNA transmission varies wildly, but a first cousin would usually be 600–1200 cM, with each generation cutting it roughly in half. See this chart.
There is no proof that the DNA actually came through the Huntington line; any match could be from a different unknown ancestor, or partly from a Huntington and partly from another ancestor. However, put together I think it makes a strong case.
I center around Caleb Huntington and his (second1) wife Jane Turner, also providing his Huntington ancestry as far back as known.
Arnold and Ruth Martell are siblings, so any relationship between their respective descendants would be “doubled”. More generally, intermarriages between families may result in multiple relationships and thus larger matches.
The DNA evidence gives me reason to believe that I am descended from Caleb, husband of Jane Turner, and that probably Robert's father is a member of this family.
Among Caleb's children, John stands out as by far the most likely. Could he be Robert's father “John”? He was a farmer in Grand Mira his whole adult life; his wife Ruth died in 1900. More likely, any of his several children could also be Robert's father.
John's son Caleb has large matches, which is suggestive, although another explanation might be that Robert is also descended from the Spencer family, and thus has a doubled match due to these Huntington sisters marrying Spencer brothers.
Robert named his first son Hubert, and family lore says Robert had an older brother also named Hubert. Caleb (1833–1916), son of John and Ruth, had a son Hubert Frederick Huntington (1868–1942) among his six known children. Hubert moved extensively, living (at least) in Idaho, Montana, Arizona, and eventually California, and named a son Robert born in 1919. However, no evidence ties him to our Robert, and he is younger.
We have DNA information specifically on Robert's mother. Three matches that point to this area of Nova Scotia include at least one X chromosome segment. The X is not passed from father to son and so could only be through Robert's mother.
Two (2 segs 55 cM / 2 segs 82 cM and 1 seg 17 cM / 1 seg 17 cM) include ancestors from the town Cornwallis, but with no Huntingtons.
A third is the second under generation (a) above. This suggests Robert's mother is in fact Emily Frances Gesner. Otherwise, she would have to be independently related to this match in some different, unknown way, which seems much less likely. This lends strong support to the Henry hypothesis below.
One possibility is that Mary Ann, daughter of John and Ruth, is Robert's illegitimate mother. She married at age 32 to an older Irish immigrant named Thomas Armstrong. Perhaps she had an out-of-wedlock child in her 20s, who carried the name Huntington and who she surrendered to an orphanage. This could account for Robert's mother's name being recollected as “Mary A.”, albeit with the wrong surname; and such a child might not be listed in family histories.
However, there seems no documentary evidence of such a birth. And the DNA matches to Caleb's descendants are unusually large for this relationship, unless the father is a Spencer, such as Theophilus, father of William and Robert. So, it is hard to make this fit. Moreover, the only evidence pointing specifically to Mary is her (very common) name, which is pretty thin.
Caleb and Emily had a child Henry whose details are a remarkable match for Robert. His age is about right, and Henry's birthday of June 10 matches both my family's tradition of Robert's birthday and contemporary records. I have found no documentation of Henry after the 1891 Canada census, while the first record of Robert is in 1896. The Huntington book says Henry was last heard serving on an American ship before the Spanish-American War, and we know Robert served on ships during and after the war. And Henry of course had a brother Hubert.
Thus, this hypothesis posits that Robert changed his name, and furthermore concocted and maintained an elaborate tale about his past. We would have to assume some circumstance caused Henry to leave his country and hide his true history. This would all be quite unusual, and, although it fits well with the DNA, the evidence remains circumstantial.
1915 The Huntington Family in America: A Genealogical Memoir of the Known Descendants of Simon Huntington from 1633 to 1915, Including Those who Have Retained the Family Name, and Many Bearing Other Surnames. Available online at Google Books.