RootsChat.Com

My little boy woke up in the night around 1am, and for once I was actually quite glad when I realised the Suffolk registers had gone live! Had a fun hour looking at them before I went back to sleep.

I’ve already found loads of records I was hoping for. The highlight so far was my great nan’s baptism unexpectedly popping up, she was born in London but her mums family were from Suffolk. I found a couple of other baptisms I was looking for straight away! Loving seeing the original signatures on marriages also. Around 25% of my ancestry is from Suffolk and has been on the back burner for years, so this will keep me busy for ages.

So excited for this - around a quarter of my ancestry is Suffolk centred and I live 200 miles away, so I’ve had all these lines on the back burner for years!

Crossing my fingers for the 14th 

Thanks for the recommendation, I’ve just finished listening to it all on BBC Sounds. I’m really torn, I enjoyed the story and can absolutely understand the drive to uncover the truth but really did feel for the other family impacted in such a significant way (trying not to give spoilers). I did think the pair researching came off quite badly at times and needed to respect the families wishes more than they did.

It was an amazing story though!

As others have mentioned, the first step is to group the matches. If you assign your larger matches to three groups that fit with the grandparents families you know, in theory the last cluster of big matches should point to the family of her missing grandparent.

I did this with my Nan’s mystery grandparent - same scenario, she’s still living, her mother was illegitimate, and my Nan kindly did a DNA test for me. I only used the larger matches >70cM to cluster with. When I had identified a group who didn’t fit any of the known grandparents, I set about building their family tree and working out how they were all related to each other. I used https://dnapainter.com/tools/sharedcmv4 this website to try and figure out the possible relationships to my Nan. It took a lot of hard work, but I’ve now confidently narrowed it down to two brothers (who funnily enough lived in the next household to her teenage grandmother in the census taken the year before the pregnancy!). Neither had any living legitimate children whose descendants might pop up on a DNA test so I doubt I’ll ever know for certain unfortunately.

The biggest challenge I’ve found has been pedigree collapse when you’re dealing with small towns where everyone was related one way or another, so be wary of drawing conclusions from smaller matches is my advice!

If you press ‘clip’ there is an option to clip the whole page and download it