The Hampshire Family Historian | Volume 50 No.1 | June 2023

Member’s article

My DNA journey

Back in 1978 I was looking for an evening class. Neither pottery nor flower arranging appealed but Tracing Your Family History seemed a possibility so I enrolled for a year’s course with the redoubtable Mrs Clench. Anyone out there remember her? Within a couple of weeks I was hooked and have been ever since. However, I very soon received a rather nasty jolt. I well remembered meeting my great grandfather, my Nanna’s dad, as a small child and I knew all the names of her siblings as she often talked about them. Imagine my dismay when I discovered that she had been born six years before her mother Ellen married and no father was named on her birth certificate! My mother had suspected that the man she called grandfather George was actually her mother’s stepfather but apart from knowing that her grandmother had been in service in London when she became pregnant she could tell me no more. So, I was left with only seven lines to trace, irritating but there’s was nothing to be done about it. Fast forward some forty plus years to a time when the advances made in DNA testing had increased the possibility of being able to discover relationships between those who had done a test. I decided to give it a go on the “nothing ventured, nothing gained” principle so spat into the little tube provided by Ancestry, sent it off and awaited the results. When they came back my DNA provided no surprises with 83% of it primarily from England and the Channel Islands and a few extra percentage from other European areas.

Ellen Moyes

Of much more interest were the names of those who were linked to me through our DNA at the second or third cousin level, meaning we shared great or great great grandparents. Most of them I recognised as descendants of great uncles or aunts but one did not fit in. How was I related to this Elizabeth? I viewed her tree but none of the surnames were familiar nor were her families from areas where I knew my ancestors had lived. At that time Ancestry only indicated a general matching of DNA but recently this has been refined to a connection with either paternal or maternal line. Elizabeth and I are connected through my maternal line. Promising! I started some more serious digging into her tree.

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