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Showing posts from January, 2020

BOTH my Grandfathers Caught out by DNA Matching

About 4 years ago I was contacted out of the blue by a chap called Bob who lives in Western Australia. He'd never known the identity of his maternal grandfather until one of his sisters uploaded her DNA to Family Tree DNA. The report came back that it closely matched my mother's brother who had had his own DNA analysed and stored online for an entirely separate purpose. Seems his dad, my grandfather Simeon, had a 'relationship' with an 18 year-old waitress in Portsmouth in 1924 when my mother was 4 years old. He was a travelling salesman and Portsmouth was on his patch. We'll never know if he knew she became pregnant because the baby was given up to an orphanage. Shame on him if he knew and abdicated his responsibility. But we'll probably have to give him the benefit of the doubt, because it happened again to her a couple of years later with another unknown man. Bob shared some pictures of his mother with me. She was the spitting image of my mum. They were wit