RootsChat.Com

My mtDNA came out as K1a4a1a3 plus three extra mutations in the HVR2 region. I already knew it was K1a4a1a from a 23andMe test some years ago so the single additional letter didn't add much. There were 33 matches. Of the 3, 0-distance matches one was from the Yorkshire/Nottinghamshire/Lincolnshire area, another from Germany and the third didn't give any location information. Eupedia says it has been found in Germany, Britain and Ireland so that checks out. I've traced my maternal line back to Upper Clatford, Hampshire in 1801.

Most of the matches give little geographical information. Interestingly, two of the 2-distance matches list the same woman as their earliest known maternal ancestor but she is in Pennsylvania and at 2-distance the MRCA would be a thousand or so years back.

It was interesting to satisfy my curiosity but has yielded no assistance in breaking through my maternal line brick wall.

I know your pain with Anglesey genealogy. I did a tree for a friend, a Jones with his paternal line from around Amlwch. Once you get beyond the census years it becomes impossible to distinguish couples that have the same exact names getting married in the same year in the same place.

My paternal grandfather and his first wife married twice with no divorce in between. There are two certificates. The first time was in 1927 in a Register Office. The second time was on the same day/month in 1930 in a church. The first certificate has their ages adjusted so the bride appears 4 years younger than the groom although she was actually 12 years older. On the second one she settled for appearing one year older than him. Using the same day/month seems very sensible. It is difficult enough remembering one wedding anniversary. Imagine having to remember two.

A few years later the bride was committed to an asylum with religious mania. I suspect that is related to her wanting to repeat the wedding in a church. Earlier in 1930 my grandfather's father died, leaving enough money to his only child to buy a house and presumably also enough to afford the church ceremony the bride wanted.

They divorced in 1946, shortly before my grandfather married the next door neighbour. I wonder if they had to consider whether there should be two divorces to balance the two marriages. The neighbour was also divorced. She worked as a solicitor's assistant. Maybe she got a trade discount on divorces.

So, in total my grandfather lived with three women and married three times, twice to the first one, not at all to the second one (Gwen, who already married someone else in 1932 when she was 22 and that groom pretended to be 39 but was actually 52 necessitating a later official adjustment to the marriage certificate) and once to the third one. The second one was my father's biological mother. My father didn't work out that he was illegitimate until the third one died in 1991. He thought it was hilarious and was minded to change the family name to Fitzbowley.

I have a similar case in the 1921 census. A suspected GGF of mine was father to a three year old child. The mother died a few months after the child was born. The father, along with many others, was put out of work by the collapsing railway companies and was in the workhouse when the census was taken. The child was listed as a boarder in a house otherwise occupied by two widowed sisters, unrelated to the child but living in the neighbourhood. There was no further record for either father or child until 1939 to say how the situation was resolved.

I'm not impressed. There is nothing at all for North Fambridge, Essex which is where I suspect my GGF was. The nearest are Rettendon and Woodham Ferrers, several miles away.

I also looked for a friend's grandfather with surname Vandermeulen with no match found. Then I found his grandmother with surname Bissell and the grandfather was right beside her. I tried loads of misspellings to try and find him in the index but no luck. Also, the hovering over the result to see the other occupants trick didn't work, maybe because they were lodgers, so I don't know how they mistranscribed his surname.

Thank you all for your help. I'm not that worried about finding the father although I'd note that Charles and Harold are not names that crop up in Kate's branch of the family so may well have something to do with the father. More interesting is that Kate found the Workhouse a more appealing option than going back to her parents. The child was Kate's parents' first grandchild. Her father was a merchant clerk so not poor. Kate was back living with them in 1911. She was also in the Workhouse, just for a day, in 1915 after her father died and her sisters returned from Canada with a couple of young children and the house would have been very full. There was something odd going on in that family that had the happy group photographs but also some of the daughters needing to get away at times but finding it hard to survive on their own. I can see similar behaviour in their descendants.