So Who Is He? Part II

So where was I?

Ah yes. W. 

W popped up as a match about this time last year. Categorised as a third cousin by Ancestry, she matched Mum with 93cM shared over 6 DNA segments. She didn’t match any of the known biological maternal side, nor did she match the Purcill/Cowell/Kable/Wells paternal surnames/matches that had been identified either. W did not match C, K, K’s brother, G or G’s granddaughter, or any of the other matches who descend from the aforementioned families. So how the hell did she match us?Weirdly, W shared a handful of fourth cousins with us that had the Burley, Saxby and Reeves families in common though, who I had worked out Mum is a descendant of. I couldn’t fully determine the exact relationship though by looking at W’s profile, as she didn’t have a tree attached.

What kind of relationship could we possibly be looking at here?

A whole new lot of relationship ranges to investigate! I contacted W and she responded within hours.

I was floored to discover that she was donor conceived and had taken the DNA test to help find her donor.  Adoption, IVF, all on the same side of the family. W and I exchanged email addresses and corresponded over the course of a couple of months. She started with no family pedigree for her donor, but she was was lucky to find a search angel willing to work her magic on her DNA results, leading to the construction of said pedigree. This eventually produced an identification of W’s donor, corroborated with the information provided by the IVF clinic. By this stage, W and I had added each other on Facebook and had spoken on the phone, trying to compare each other’s pedigrees to one another…

…and, there was not one Burley or Saxby name listed in this pedigree. It was extensive, what had been constructed. I considered that perhaps W matched Mum, my sister and I on her maternal line…but that turned up no common surnames either. A benefit of DNA testing is that the amount of DNA shared between you can often eliminate potential relationships, based on the information given. Saves one a bit of time at least! W was certainly not anything more distant than a 3rd cousin once removed. Third cousins share great great grandparents. We have 16 of those in total (8 on your maternal side, 8 on your paternal side)…and I had, going off the mirror tree built on K’s family, four out of the possible eight paternal great great grandparents.

My main question was this: how, if W matched known Saxby/Burley/Reeves/Williams relatives, did she not have ANY OF THESE NAMES IN HER EXTENSIVELY RESEARCHED PATERNAL PEDIGREE. WHY!????? If, at the most distant, Mum and W were third cousins, and they shared matches with the aforementioned surnames, surely W shared these guys with us:

Known paternal ancestors of Mum.

But no, not according to the pedigree that had been constructed. This had been meticulously done, but I went through and double checked everything, researched it on my own. I spoke to some of the shared matches who were in the upper end of the list in terms of genetic proximity to both W and Mum…what I found out is that they were descendants of the same couple:

Amanda Elvira Mulvinia Saxby and William Boorer

There’s my Saxby! And, for W, Boorer went with her own paternal pedigree. Upon further research, I discovered Amanda’s parents were:

Edward Saxby and Rebecca Burley

William’s parents were:

Thomas Boorer and Ann Muddle

Now hold up a second. Are you seeing what I’m seeing with the middle couple there? I thought I was going crazy. And to be honest, it wasn’t to be the last time I was going to feel that way either. Upon further digging, this is what I ended up with:

Colour coded for who married whom.

Helloooo. So the Saxby family married into the Burley family. Twice. Two brothers from one family, married two sisters from another family. This makes for some interesting double relationships where descendants are concerned. Bet these guys never thought their descendants would have DNA testing at their disposal! But, this was super common back in the day. This was certainly the way of the  late 19th/early 20th century families of the North Coast of NSW.

So I had found a possible connection, and Ann Muddle and Thomas Boorer were listed as W’s direct ancestors at the fourth great grandparent level. I put our pedigrees down side by side, including Amanda Elvira Mulvinia Saxby into mine, despite the fact that she is a collateral relative to us (being the child of Mum’s 4th great uncle, in going off what we knew from K & C’s tree)….

But basically all this revealed was that the only way W and Mum could be related is by marriage only. And well, DNA had shown us otherwise, there was no doubt that Mum and W were related by blood.

I needed to visualise this, but have since decided I need a much bigger whiteboard. But, as you can see, if both our pedigrees were correct, it would mean W and Mum shouldn’t share DNA at all.

This was me at this very point of realisation, knowing that I still hadn’t worked out the answer:

 

 

W gave me access to her DNA results, so I could dig deeper. I needed to see exactly how she matched our shared matches. Let’s put it this way. They weren’t all distant ones, I’ll tell you that much! But the Saxby/Burley/Reeves/Williams lines were clearly not our specific genetic connection here.

So how are we related?!

I researched W’s pedigree further, expanding the tree down to the current day generations as much as possible, as I had with C & K’s pedigree. The families that I’ve researched so far in search of Bio Granddad are absolutely fascinating. Very large families, with many instances of intermarriage-they all lived along the North Coast of NSW, with some moving to Queensland and into Sydney in certain cases. I was completely at a loss though with how W and I connected…

So we waited. I decided we needed more mutual DNA matches for the purposes of contextualising our connection…which came a couple of months after initiating contact with W. Another high match, categorised as a 3rd cousin, with 95cM shared over 6 DNA segments to Mum…categorised as a 4th cousin to W, with 21.8cM over 2 DNA segments shared…

The surname of this match?

Nugent.