I do feel a little guilty when I uncover the long-held secrets that some of my ancestors must have thought they had taken to the grave, but there is no denying that resolving these intriguing puzzles is an immensely satisfying aspect of researching family history.
Inevitably, now that DNA testing is so readily available, such secrets often relate to the parentage of a child, and most researchers will find a mystery match or two somewhere amongst the list of familiar names, or perhaps even realise that the genes don’t match their paper trail.
In my own tree, the DNA results appear to verify the documentary evidence that I originally used to establish the line of my direct ancestors, but one of my highest matches is a lady I will call Rose, and her tree does not correspond with mine.
Ancestry narrows down the options for how we might be related by identifying her as a match on my mother’s side, and running the amount of DNA we share through an online predictor suggests a range of ways in which our families might be connected. All of these predictions put our common ancestor at no further back than one of my great grandparents.
Rose was born around the same time as my mother, and her family was from a village in Suffolk that is just a few miles from where my grandfather’s family lived. Trawling through our shared DNA matches reveals that she also has connections to ancestors from the family trees of both of my great grandparents, Samuel Cullingford and Esther Page, making it most likely that Rose is descended from one of my grandfather’s brothers.
It may never be possible to identify which one, or to establish what the nature of the relationship was, and in any case I think I should perhaps now leave this puzzle unresolved. The drive to learn as much as I can about my ancestors is strong but, now that I have satisfied my natural curiosity regarding a mystery match, the fact is that this story does not actually have any direct impact on my understanding of where I came from. This is clearly not the case for Rose and her family, so this secret is theirs to tell, not mine.
Sleuthing Notes 