Brenda’s talk was a follow up to her article, A Complex Broken Family, published on page 194 of the Society’s June 2020 journal. Members can read the article in back copies of the Journals and also in the Member’s area of the website. In this article Brenda described finding her father-in-law through DNA. Three strands of research were discussed.
Father-in-law’s mother was a double bigamist, and would have got away with the first bigamous marriage as supported by all the paperwork around that husband’s death during WW1. But the age difference between her and the third husband prompted her sister-in-law to object. Newspaper articles about the trials yielded lots of information to support the theory that two of her sons were not biological children of the first husband. A subsequent remarriage to a third husband in Canada - he was a ‘home child’ - resulted in a certificate with enough information to support the theory of a name change and discovery of his real origins.
Father-in-law’s second marriage certificate was very interesting! He was described as a bachelor, so was he also a bigamist or was it simply a case of the bride wanting a proper church wedding before going off to a new life in Canada? Both of them would have known that no Roman Catholic priest would have married a known divorcee, but the marriage and any divorce took place several thousand miles away in Canada.
Interestingly the groom’s residence was the same as the address on a letter written to him during WW2 by an unknown sister. Research into the witnesses to the marriage revealed that one of them was the husband of this ‘sister’ who was actually only a step sister. She was the paternal half-sister to Father-in-law’s maternal half-brother.
Thirdly close analysis of the DNA evidence showed that Brenda’s husband has around 12% Greek and south east European ethnicity admixture - and his closest paternal matches, three half nephews, each also have small amounts of Greek and southern European ethnicity. Importantly they have shared matches with people with Greek names, some of whom have online trees populated by people from Greece. None of these matches are shared with a known paternal half first cousin who descends from the first marriage. The conclusion has to be that father-in-law’s paper trail father (the second husband who was Irish) was not his biological father. The biological father would have been Anglo-Greek!
This was a wonderful example of good paper research coupled with DNA evidence and showed how a determined researcher can knock down even the sturdiest of brickwalls.