Could DNA testing help discover father of my illegitimate Grandmother?

[Dundee]

This is interesting, not a bad result for a 1% match and some hard work.

http://www.bbc.com/news/stories-42256465

Debra 

[brigidmac]

If your grandmother's father had other children.  Legitimately or illegitimately their grandchildren would show up as 3rd 4th or 5th cousin matches to you on Ancestry if the places of birth of their great grandfather s matched that could be a clue   again I was lucky that my great grandfather s family had emigrated to USA where a lot more people do the DNA testing also that they knew the country of origin of the patriarch .

You may be lucky if his later grandchildren are still alive their DNA may match your own

Good luck

[Yonks Ago]

A sibling or Aunty or Uncle of his would also show DNA. I have heard where a lady found her birth mother on a DNA match of 10%. The mother did not do a DNA test but a distant relative of hers did. The lady who was looking for her birth mother looked at all her matches even down to the very low cM and saw that this person that matched her on 10% had a middle name which was her mothers maiden name and this was all the lady knew of her mother.
DNA gets weaker as you go back generations. But it is worth looking at all your DNA matches.

Yonks

[River Tyne Lass]

Thank you everyone for these extra posts.  The next time I can get over to South Shields in the New Year I will ask at the records office to see if they may have an affiliation order tucked away somewhere.

I do wonder whether he may have died before my Grandmother was born?  When doing research I have come across people dying suddenly of illness which they likely would have survived today and occupational death such as mine accidents and death at sea.  My Great Grandmother 's brother was drowned at sea in 1902 just beyond the Shields piers when a storm started.  He was an apprentice pilot.  There was an attempt to save the two men in the boat but they only had time to save one and so my Great Grandmother's brother was washed away and drowned according to the Shields Gazette.  The man who was saved was called James Carter and he later gave medals to all his rescuers.

It would be fortunate though if my Great Grandfather had other children and if there might be a possibility of DNA matches through their lines.  Would an autosomal test be the one to go for? 

Merry Christmas Everyone

[Yonks Ago]

Yes the Autosomal is family finder one [ FTDNA ] Do you have Ancestry Subscription..as It was Ancestry DNA which helped me knock down my 20 odd year old brickwall. Ancestry DNA do have a tool which you can put in a surname and or Place which matches you to those who are DNA linked.
Yonks

[Velma76]

I believe my DNA test may have done exactly this.

My maternal grandmother was born in 1926, and her mother never revealed the identity of the father.

My recent DNA test showed two second cousins in Ireland (309cm over 16), one of whom has been really forthcoming. He told me that he knew his connection with the other guy, their grandparents were siblings, but there was no obvious link with me. The family had stayed in the same region of Ireland for years, and I had no traceable history there.

But then he told me that three great great uncles had moved to Birmingham, were my great grandmother was, in the 1920s. It seems highly likely that one of them is my great grandfather. My mum is doing a test now, just to cut the odds down further.

I don't know if we'll ever be sure which brother it was, there's no-one left in living memory, but it's interesting to research. My new Irish cousin has told me of an ancestor who was a printed author, and things like that I never could have found out through genealogy alone, due to legitimacy.

[brigidmac]

Rivertyne lass
Have you decided to do DNA

Do keep us posted ...

And anyone else who solves this kind of mystery i think concrete examples really help show how to work with clues .

[hurworth]

Yes, it certainly can.

It took almost three years until a match that was close enough to really narrow it down turned up.  We believe the match's grandmother's brother was the father. 

[jillruss]

Absolutely! I've been 'lucky' twice, though I put it down to a lot of detective work as well as quite a bit of luck

My paternal great grandmother was illegitimate - born 1870 but no father's name on her birth certificate. Her mother would only have been about 14 when she was conceived and the grandparents passed my gt grandmother off as theirs on the 1871 census. I'd resigned myself to never knowing who her father was - until I did my DNA test and got a match with a lady in the USA, who was as determined as I was to find our - rather strong (46 cMs) - connection. The connection was actually with her husband's side.

We kept chipping away, even though she didn't have a tree on Ancestry, but we were making no progress until I checked out our shared matches (I was new to this at the time - I look at the shared matches as a matter of course now). This 2nd match had one chap - and only one - in England and. long story short (and it did take a few months!), that name turned out to be the 3-way connection. My natural great grandfather was more or less the same age as my gt grandmother; lived a few hundred yards up the road from her on the 1871 census - and emigrated with his parents and siblings to the USA soon after!! Since then about 4 or 5 further matches have arisen from the same US family - and most of them also match with my brother and my niece.

My second discovery was of a similar nature (53 cMs) but concerned my maternal great grandfather who was born 3 years after the death of his mother's first husband, and 3 years before her marriage to her second husband. Again, I'd pretty much given up trying to find his father. Again, it was the American lady's husband who was the link and again it took some finding. Eventually a surname she gave me for one of her husband's US ancestors triggered something in my head - not that I had that name in my tree but it sounded very much like a west yorkshire surname, and that's where my gt grandfather lived! From little acorns, and all that!! The US family hadn't even researched their tree back to England but had a vague inkling that family stories said that's where that line might have come from. Again, later additional matches proved to confirm it even more - and,yes, their family also emigrated to the US soon after my gt grandfather was born.

So, luck - yes - but, make no mistake, you'd have to be very, very lucky indeed if you just sit back and wait for the matches to come to you. They almost certainly won't. Keep chipping away (politely) give people access to your tree if its private and just keep the 'conversation' going.

I suppose that matches further back in time may prove more difficult to establish, especially if there's no census to help verify where they were living at the time, but I do currently have a third one (23.1 cMs)I'm working on and she was a 3xgreat grandmother born in 1805!!

Jill