First I'd like to apologize for my last flurry of erratic & chaotic posting. My DNA tests really threw up more questions than answers, and apparently I'm a hot mess of mutations as well. I should've stayed well away from the keyboard while sorting that out.
On to George Haycock.
As so many of you have helped in trying to shed light on George's origins, It's only fair I now present you with the answer to that riddle wrapped in an enigma. George was, indeed, a bastard.
As a last resort to break through that brick wall, I took a final DNA test with Ancestry. Among the hundreds (!) of matches, two caught my eye. Both were linked to a family called Whitehouse from Wolverhampton, and as some of you may remember, the story within the family was that George's mother was a woman named Maria Whitehouse.
I started to flesh out the Whitehouse tree which connected these individuals, in the hope of finding a suitable match, and soon found myself neck deep into a Gordian Knot of families named Whitehouse, Millington, Beddows and Martin. After uncovering the parentage of a Beddows-Martin son (connecting more DNA matches), who apparently tried escaping his illegitimate origins by changing his last name, fudging his father's name on his marriage certificate, and moving away from Wolverhampton, I got some ideas on how George's origins could have been obscured (including lying about his DoB on his naval papers). So I took a closer look at the Martin sister who was Agnes Millington-Whitehouse's mother.
Her name was Maria.
She married William Millington, and with every child I uncovered, he was listed as their father. Yet little details started to give me the nagging feeling that I was, in fact, looking at George's mother. Especially because the names of Agnes Whitehouse's daughters were all eerily similar to those of George and his Haycock half-siblings.
And then I found George Millington, baptized in June 1862 as the son of William Millington and Maria Martin. That really, really coincided with George Haycock's birth in May 1862! I gathered all the small DNA matches connecting several branches of the families, and set up a tree on DNA Painter's WATO (What Are The Odds) tool to see whether my hypothesis that George fit within the family was viable. It was.
Then I discovered a fact that blew me away. On the index for Wolverhampton parishes I discovered William Millington buried at Merridale cemetery at the age of 26 in September 1856. Logically, no children born after June 1857 could be his. Except he supposedly had six more, including George!
I cannot begin to describe the sense of elation when realizing I was about to crack a decades old mystery. But a theory is just that, and I needed proof, so I began to track all of the Millington children through the censuses in the hope I'd find a Millington-Martin-Haycock connection.
One son named Luke (1868) kept eluding me in the 1901 census. By then I had the first name of his wife and several daughters mentioned in the 1911 and 1939 census. But nothing I tried revealed the whereabouts of the family in 1901. So as a last shot I entered the wife's first name (Minnie), her DoB and PoB (1873 in Limerick, Ireland) and looked for her in Wolverhampton in 1901. Immediately the whole family popped up.
Under the name Haycocks.
That to me not only confirmed that George Millington was, indeed, John Haycock's son, but it also provided me with the near-certainty that at least Luke Millington, and possibly more or all of the children born after 1856, were also John's.
Agnes Whitehouse named one of her sons after both her and husband John's father John, and one presumably after John's brother James, but she named two after her brothers by John Haycock; George and Luke. None of them were named after either William Millington or his sons Samuel and Zachariah, her half-brothers.
I have no clue why Maria Martin-Millington was known within the family as Maria Whitehouse, though I suspect that George's sister Agnes being pretty close to the Haycock side of her family may have contributed to the name Whitehouse becoming 'stuck'. I also don't know how Maria met John, and maybe I never will. George becoming part of John Haycock's family sometime between 1862 and 1871 may have to do with Maria giving birth to twins in 1868 (Luke and his brother John, the latter dying at 5mo) and being overwhelmed. Who knows.
What really gets me the most is the fact that it only took me a week (!) of furious research, tweaking family trees and throwing several hypotheses at the wall to see which one would stick to solve a 25yo mystery.
Finally, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to all of you who've helped me try to find George over the past decade or so. I'm not sure whether George Millington ever came across our keyboards, but it's fair to say the solution to this puzzle was somewhat unexpected.
All that matters now is that George has been found.
