RootsChat.Com

Thank you crumblie

Something similar happened to my husband. After his dna came back he got lots of close family matches  to a family neither they nor us could place in our trees. The family did live in our home town and my husband’s family had come here around 100 years ago. Initially we thought his dad was born to a different father as we could not find any matches with his uncommon surname. Then his sister got tested and came back as a half sibling ( with lots of matches to the family name). Both his parents are long dead.

So it seems his mother became pregnant by a different man.  No one has any idea of the circumstances. It’s been very difficult for my husband who says he feels differently now about his siblings. Only he and his sister are aware of the facts.

He tore up a family tree his brother had constructed on the basis that none of them were relatives after all!  We managed to narrow his “father” to three brothers: the most likely of them has several adult children still living in the town but he doesn’t want to make any contact. So unless one of them does a dna test and makes contact we will leave it there.

On the bright side the actual father’s ancestral family are very embedded locally, living In villages  literally a couple of miles away  So we have got back to the 1700s and can see the churches they were baptised and buried in so that’s more interesting and, really, once you go back 3 or 4 generations the personal connections aren’t there anyway, in my view. They’re still ag labs, just in a different part of the country!

It looks like it starts with a K and there seems to be a dotted “i “ - despite that, Henderskelfe  ?

Further to Zetlander’s reply, my pregnant maternal grandmother was evacuated to South Wales, as were all her children  except my mother. When she died in childbirth her body was brought back to London by train. Apparently this required a (?) coroner’s certificate to pass through each district and proved so costly that when my mother’s  brother died a year later they couldn’t afford to repeat it and he was buried in the municipal cemetery where he died. Luckily we have the memorial cards which show the grave numbers. It might be worth seeing if any are tucked away as it seems to be the norm for the times.

Good luck

It might be worth checking: a marriage certificate I ordered on 1st May and received a couple of weeks ago still says in progress ( a pdf ordered 5/6/2020 clearly says despatched ).