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Finding the father

H

Haahoo

LostCousins Member
Hello,

DNA matches suggest that it is very likely that my grandfather's biological father was not the person named on his birth certificate who was married to the mother at the time of the birth (and had been for at least 10 years previously, though they appear to have become estranged in the decade following the birth of my grandfather, who was their last child).

There are a number of close matches with people descended from a family who were living in the right area (Islington/north London) at the time of conception. My question is how to zero in on the biological father. That family had three or four males...

Any advice gratefully received.
H
 
Haahoo said:
Hello,

DNA matches suggest that it is very likely that my grandfather's biological father was not the person named on his birth certificate who was married to the mother at the time of the birth (and had been for at least 10 years previously, though they appear to have become estranged in the decade following the birth of my grandfather, who was their last child).

There are a number of close matches with people descended from a family who were living in the right area (Islington/north London) at the time of conception. My question is how to zero in on the biological father. That family had three or four males.
Click to expand...
You don't mention whether they are brothers or cousins or even from the same generation.

The answer is the one I gave in My DNA presentation on Wednesday - test each hypothesis against the evidence. This is more difficult to do if there are n brothers involved since you can only differentiate between them if descendants of at least (n-1) brothers have tested.
 
Clarification? By "DNA matches suggest", you mean that you have no DNA matches with any of his siblings, or parents families? Are you classifying (usually by using the Group feature) your DNA cousins into which of your four grandparents they are related to?? If so, you should be able to identify the closest cousin who doesn't fit any of the other three. Then check this cousins "Shared Matches" to see if they can be allocated. If not this group of cousins are probably related to your real grandfather.
 
John Dancy said:
Clarification? By "DNA matches suggest", you mean that you have no DNA matches with any of his siblings, or parents families? Are you classifying (usually by using the Group feature) your DNA cousins into which of your four grandparents they are related to?? If so, you should be able to identify the closest cousin who doesn't fit any of the other three. Then check this cousins "Shared Matches" to see if they can be allocated. If not this group of cousins are probably related to your real grandfather.
Click to expand...
I think Haahoo's problem is that having identified the right family, there is no obvious way of determining which of the brothers was the father. This is a common problem - there was an example in my newsletter a few years ago: in that case it was possible to work out which brother was the father by testing descendants of the brothers, though even if it had proved impossible to solve, it wouldn't have represented a 'brick wall' (since all the brothers had the same parents).
 
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