Pluto Genealogy

Part of the very recent history of my family is my oldest daughter’s love for planets when she was little. Every night I read to her from my old National Geographic planet book. When that wore out, she insisted on being read to from the pages that were still held together by broken bits of spine. Some bedtime reading sessions included hunting through her bookshelf for the middle of the Jupiter chapter or the first two pages on Saturn, or whatever crucial bit was missing.

Obviously, I had to buy a new planet book. The new one had much better pictures, but she noticed that the pictures of Pluto weren’t really any better and were not very interesting. Just fuzzy patches. I explained that spaceships had been to the other planets (Pluto was still classified as a planet at the time) since the old book was made and so we had much better pictures of them, but Pluto hadn’t been visited yet. Imagine her excitement when a spaceship was launched toward Pluto. I had to burn a DVD of the launch from video on NASA’s website so that we could watch it. I think it was at the moment of launch that the announcer’s voice said something about New Horizon’s nine and a half year voyage to Pluto. After hearing that a few times, she announced that she was going to have a party when it arrived. Over the years we’ve gone onto NASA’s site every so often to see where New Horizons was. I think it was partially out of interest and partially because she had found memories of the planet book (long since out-grown) and her vow to have a party.

Last week she had her party. She baked a Pluto cake and frosted it according to the latest images, and surrounded it with cupcakes for the moons. She and her friends thought it was good geeky fun. The day of the party, I realized that I might be able to give her a little surprise. When I was a kid and getting interested in genealogy, my mom pointed out that she had an aunt whose maiden name was Tombaugh and that Clyde Tombaugh was the man who discovered Pluto. She didn’t know if they were related but wondered if it was possible. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Great-aunts by marriage weren’t my highest genealogical priority. These days research can sometimes go pretty quickly, and I wondered if my mom’s speculation might not be a fun thing to check. I knew where and when my great-aunt was born and Clyde Tombaugh has a Wikipedia page. It was easy to determine that she and Clyde were from about the same place and born only a few years apart. I would have known about it if they were siblings, but perhaps cousins?

A little census work showed that they couldn’t have been first cousins. A little more work and and I got back to a family indexed as “Farnbaugh” in 1850. Looking at the enumerators handwriting showed that the first letter couldn’t be “F.” A little more checking showed the first letter was “T” and that “rn” was “m,” and that the name was Tambaugh, a reasonable version of Tombaugh. Among the apparent sons of Matthias “Farnbaugh” were the the grandfathers of Clyde and my great-aunt, who were apparently second cousins. I drew it all out on scratch paper and handed it to her during the cake eating and told her I thought that it was correct but didn’t have enough time to do a real proof. Take a sufficiently excited/silly teenager and add a partially supported genealogical argument that her father’s great-aunt by marriage was the second cousin of the man who discovered Pluto and even a genealogist can add to the geeky space-based excitement.