(10) When I began tracing my family tree on the night of the 23rd of December 2009, I found my grandmother in the England and Wales Birth Index. The birth was in 1918, and so the mother's maiden name was listed. It was the same as her birth surname. As a complete novice this meant nothing to me. An error, I thought. Her younger sister's birth index entry also had a mother's maiden name listed, and was not the same as the birth surname.
At this time the most recent census available online was the 1901 census. My father didn't know the names of his grandparents, just his aunts and uncles, only one of who was born for the 1901 census, as well as the name of the farm they lived at. That was enough to be able to trace the line.
So I traced my grandmother, as a child of that family, at the same farm. Shortly thereafter my father's cousin, who I'd never met before, turned up at my home. Only I was in. She told me that both my paternal great-grandfather and my paternal grandmother were born out of wedlock. The penny dropped with the same surname as mother's maiden name in the birth index. To my novice shame, at that point (about 1-2 months into research) I'd botched in an invented line from my great-grandfather. The cousin shared ancestry via my great-grandfather, but not my grandmother. Yet my grandmother, when on her death bed, had revealed her niece by marriage that she had been born out of wedlock and raised as a child of her biological grandparents.
Shortly thereafter I purchased the birth certificate of my grandmother, then costing about £7. No father was listed. I found her baptism in the Methodist circuit. No father. I obtained her marriage certificate. No father. I looked up a possible maintenance claim in petty sessions. Nothing.
I had raced through many branches of my tree within months of starting. But was left with three gaping holes:
1) great-grandfather born out of wedlock
2) grandmother born out of wedlock
3) great-grandmother born in India, without a surname or a likely place of birth
6 of 16 gg-grandparents missing (37.5%), and with little hope of ever finding them. It became something of an obsession. To the extent that I contacted map divination practitioners (who refused my requests), and had dreams about the name of my unknown great-grandfather being revealed to me.
My father first took FTDNA in 2013, and I found nothing at all in the matches. In about 2016 my aunt took a test with Ancestry. I looked through the matches, then a complete novice, and didn't see anything of much use.
Later my maternal aunts tested and I had much closer matches that obviously related to the unknown line 3) (above). But at a quick glance, I couldn't see how exactly the matches fitted together.
In early 2023, I began looking at those closer maternal matches, and after a lot of digging got to grips with how you can use DNA, and was able to solve 3).
Returning to 1) and 2) was more difficult. I've outlined in this thread most of what I've found on them. There just wasn't enough matches available. I've been able to determine a few ancestors, but with gaps of two generations. On 1) there is a 92cM match, which I was able to determine from just the name Margaret Evans, when ProTools became available. But it's just too much of a mess to solve at this time.
On 2) I only had matches that looked like 4th cousins, and couldn't really see how to put them together.
When I began going though my matches, I had a 49cM one that I could see had common ancestry in Wigan, which is nowhere near my paternal ancestry, all of which is from the England-Wales border. But as I became more accustomed to working with DNA, I found this 49cM match was clearly relating to my grandmother's unknown father. With a few lines provable back to c. 1700. But attempts to put various groups together were very tentative.
Often, for about two years I check my new matches on Ancestry. It's been very bare of late. I was waiting in a hotel restaurant in Morocco for 8 hours until my flight. I logged on to Ancestry and checked my new matches...
