My Brother visited the "home" country...

[jorghes]

(I'll preface this by saying I am quite "young" in relation to many people I have met so far researching their family trees, including a couple of members of my own extended family).

I had always liked, every so often, to look at the family tree that my father had been given of his family (Father's side) that had been printed up and given to the family. Lucky for us, it went back 8 generations and, I have since found, is 95% correct (there are only a few small errors).

Anyway, my trigger for more extensive searching was my older brother's trip to Scotland - which was the birth country for my paternal great-grandfather (not part of the family tree though), who had emigrated (unlike most of the rest of the family on that side) in about 1906. My brother wanted to visit the family house in Scotland and charged me with discovering where it was. I asked my grandmother (who is unfortunately the only one of my grandparents still living) about her father's family, but she couldn't really remember all of his siblings (none of whom she had met) - she thought one of them had died in the war, but this was incorrect, although it is possible they served, although I can't find the documentation.

So I went on my search for my great-grandfather's family and was able, with the help of the wonderful ScotlandsPeople, to find a lot of pertinent information and a whole stack of registration documents for births, marriages and deaths. I unfortunately hit a brick wall at one point when I found that the family had emigrated in the early 1800s, from Ireland!

I found the family house for my brother, and then went on to look at my mother's side. Her family is primarily in England and Wales, since she is the only member of her extended family in Australia. Unfortunately her grandfather was known to be illegitimate, and while his name may contain his father's, it's a little too common to just use that to identify his possible father (I was able to use that method to possibly discover my g-grandfather's older, also illegitimate, brother's father). It's a source of frustration, since it leaves my family tree quite lopsided!

I use Ancestry a lot and through that have found two of my mother's cousins, one in Wales and the other in Canada, who have also been researching branches of my mother's tree and have been able to collect photos and other items to further develop my own researching!

 

[Heather]

Welcome to the site jorghes, I am in Victoria too.

 

[jorghes]

Welcome to the site jorghes, I am in Victoria too.

Always nice to meet a fellow Victorian!

 

[Tim]

Great post Jo, and welcome to the Forum.

 

[Alexander Bisset]

One potential way of getting to your illegitimate grandfather's father - assuming he was your mothers dad's father, is to have any of your mothers brothers take a YDNA test (typically needs to be a 37 marker test to get any decent matches the 12 marker test is meaningless). This might just match up with others, since as time passes this becomes more and more difficult as candidate males die off it really is one of those things best not put off till later.

NB. If your mother's illegitimate grandfather is your mother's mother's father then you need to get a DNA test from your maternal grandmother's brothers and that is even less likely to be achievable as time passes. I note however you say that you are quite young, then perhaps there are available candidate males.

 

[jorghes]

One potential way of getting to your illegitimate grandfather's father - assuming he was your mothers dad's father, is to have any of your mothers brothers take a YDNA test (typically needs to be a 37 marker test to get any decent matches the 12 marker test is meaningless). This might just match up with others, since as time passes this becomes more and more difficult as candidate males die off it really is one of those things best not put off till later.

NB. If your mother's illegitimate grandfather is your mother's mother's father then you need to get a DNA test from your maternal grandmother's brothers and that is even less likely to be achievable as time passes. I note however you say that you are quite young, then perhaps there are available candidate males.

He would be my mother's father's father, but unfortunately my mother was an only child and my grandfather was the only male child in his family, as his older brother died young. All of his siblings who survived were sisters - they've unfortunately all died also. My g-grandfather only had half siblings, all as far as I know with different fathers - my mother didn't even know he had an older half brother, so we don't know if they shared the same father (considering their middle names, probably not). I personally have brothers, but I don't know if the same information can be gleaned from their DNA as from a closer relative.
(None of my grandfather's generation on that side of the family is still living unfortunately - only cousins, and most of them are female.)

 

[Alexander Bisset]

No Y-DNA is only passed from father to son. Having Y-DNA is what makes someone a male, it's the sex chromosome! So your mother biologically cannot have inherited any of her father's Y-DNA. Thus whilst your brothers will definitely have Y-DNA (if they didn't have Y-DNA they would be your sisters) they must have got that Y-DNA from their father. Hence testing your brothers for Y-DNA only tells you about your shared father's paternal line.

The rule with Y-DNA testing is that it is useful to find missing fathers ONLY if its is a completely unbroken male line back to the missing father. There are other forms of DNA testing most notably Autosomal DNA which could potentially find a match with the missing father's other lines however the further in time away the person being tested is from the event the less likely it is you will get a match as the DNA passed on halves each generation. So if you can get one of your parents or grandparents from that missing father's line to test Autosomal DNA you considerably increase your chances of a match the less variation there has been since the missing father.

I hope that makes sense if not then please ask.

 

[Tim]

It's not looking good then. But if your grandfathers half siblings were male and they had male children then you could prove that they had the same father if you did the YDNA tests on those lines.

 

[emjay]

Whilst you experts are discussing DNA, I would like to ask a question on the subject. A female friend (aged 70) was adopted as a baby; her adoptive parents later had a child of their own (male). Recently my friend obtained a copy of her birth certificate, which named her birth mother but the father was not named. As she gets older,people who remember her father(adoptive),remark how much she looks like him. If her 'brother would agree to it,what test would confirm or otherwise that they share the same father?

 

[Tim]

You need to check out the FamilyFinder test, but I would go back to Peter's Newsletters first because there are some excellent articles on DNA and there are also links to the websites where you can often get discounts and give some money to Lost Cousins.

 

[Alexander Bisset]

Emjay, as a female she couldn't physically give a sample for a Y-DNA test, its just not biologically possible. She could have herself and her "half" brother tested. On average you'd expect between a zero and 50% ish match, as if they only genuinely share a single parent then they would only each have inherited half of the same DNA - the other half coming from the different fathers. Most commonly this would average out around 25% match.

I say between zero and 50% as from the millions of pieces of DNA we inherit from a parent they could in theory have both inherited exactly the same DNA from their shared mother. Think of it this way imagine you are tossing a coin a million times - heads you inherit that bit from your father tails you inherit it from your mother. Each child "tosses the coin" a million times. If you look at each "toss" in turn sometimes they will get the same "both toss mother" sometimes it will different "one mother" and "one father". If they have different fathers then only 1 result out of 4 possible "tosses" would be a match

1. Friend tosses mother, brother tosses mother - match as shared mother
2. Friend tosses mother, brother tosses father - no match
3. Friend tosses father, brother tosses mother - no match
4. Friend tosses father, brother tosses father - no match as different fathers.

Note if they had the same fathers then the chances of a match double to 50%.

So as long as you realise its about random chance of a few million possible "coin tosses". Half siblings could be extremely unlucky and every single one of the coin tosses falls into the last 3 categories so they get 0% matches this is really really unlikely (think two people each doing a million coin tosses how likely is it you both toss a heads at the same time and how likely is it that by the time you are done you never got a single match?
On the other hand they could have got exceptionally lucky and every single "coin toss" was the same. This would give 50% matches. Far more likely is that it would average out around 25%.

If they shared the same father then it would average out around 50% so that would be an extremely strong indication that they did indeed share the same father.

 

[jorghes]

Thanks for all the explanation and advice - I know I don't have very much chance of finding a definitive answer about my g-grandfather's father, other than educated guesses, mainly because even though his step-father is on his marriage certificate in place of his father, he always used his mother's surname, as did his older half brother. I know little to nothing about my g-grandfather's older half brother, and I don't have any proof to say that he was married or anything like that, although, to prove that I was correct in him having the same mother, I have his birth certificate. (I first found him as "grandson" on his grandfather's census documents, where he stayed even after his mother remarried, only moving in with her when her father died.)

I think I found his father in documents, since my g-grandfather's half brother had the middle name "Leadbetter" and I was able to find a man who had the same name (first & surname), who lived within the same small area and worked as a manager at a colliery (my g-g-grandmother was a colliery hand). My g-grandfather has the middle name "Jones", and with his combination of three names (first & two middle), I would hazard a guess that would be the name of his father, however, Jones is no where near as uncommon as Leadbetter!

I've always realised that my chances of finding my g-grandfather's father are remote, but it is a little disappointing because of that massive gap in my family tree!