The Nugent Mystery

I spent the last month working on a friend’s DNA mystery. I successfully solved it in that time, identifying their biological grandparents. It has reinvigorated my desire to get on with filling the last couple of gaps in my Mum’s paternal family tree. If you recall during my search for Douglas, I unearthed some additional instances of misattributed paternity (essentially,
Daddies either were not identified or weren’t who everyone thought they were), which certainly made things difficult in the initial stages of the search! These gaps in Mum’s biological paternal family tree have taunted me for ages, but given we are dealing with two different mystery great and great-great grandfathers, I put them both in the “too hard” basket following the identification of Douglas, finding him and then having to say goodbye to him without having even met him late last year. It was all too much, I was tired and I needed time to come to terms with the intense search and attempted contact years that were 2016-2022.

But I am ready now.

First up on the mystery list: determining which Nugent brother is my Mum’s great grandfather. The final great grandparent to add to Mum’s paternal family tree.

To recap, I had to partially solve this mystery back when I was trying to identify who Mum’s father was. We had some DNA matches in her list that were around the 2nd to 3rd cousin level, but I was unable to place them in the somewhat detailed paternal family tree I had already built (the main match at that time was also donor conceived, and we matched on their donor’s side…who doesn’t love a mystery, inside a mystery, inside ANOTHER mystery? I wrote about how I got to the Nugent conclusion at length here. I know that Mum’s great great grandparents are Robert Nugent (1854-1920) and Martha Veronica Boorer (1855-1936) based off other DNA matches (again, how I came to that conclusion is in the previously linked post). However, they had four sons:

• Sydney Robert Nugent (1880-1957)
• Joseph Nugent (1886-1963)
• William Henry Nugent (1888-1964)
• Oscar Herbert Percival Nugent (1894-1966)

One of these boys fathered my Mum’s grandmother, Linda Mary Saxby in Dungog, NSW. She was born in 1906. As I have come to learn over the last two and a bit years, small towns have an incredible rumour mill. Dungog is no different. Linda’s paternity was always rumoured to have been one of these boys, according to living family. We just didn’t have the means to determine the truth until consumer DNA came into play. The 117 year old small town rumour turns out to have some truth to it. DNA never lies.

But it does bamboozle sometimes!

Which Nugent boy is Linda’s father?

I can safely rule out Oscar, the youngest son. He would have been 12 at the time of Linda’s birth.

Sydney would have been 26, Joseph 20 and William 18. All within the realm of possibility.

When looking at Mum’s DNA matches, we would need to be looking for 1st cousin once removed matches, that do not match the other three great grandparent lines. But, it gets complicated again as we aren’t looking for full matches, but half first cousin once removed matches. As far as we know, Linda was the only child of Alice Florence Saxby and a Nugent boy, they both went on to marry other people and have children with them. So we are looking DNA match descendants of a Nugent son and their wife after Alice.

Seems easy enough right?

Ha.

Mum has high matches to two of the boys, William Henry and Joseph (the 18 and 20 year old). Match 1 and 4, when run through the Shared cM Project calculator project that there is a 40% chance that Match 1 is a half second cousin. And a 28% chance that Match 4 is a half second cousin. Match 4 also has a 53% chance of being a half second cousin once removed, which would be what we are looking at if William is Mum’s great grandfather, not Joseph.

Match 3? 5% chance of being a half first cousin once removed.

Which boy is it? My hunch is William, looking at the additional matches. The child of Match 1 shows a 45% chance of being a half 2nd cousin, which would be correct if I am on the right track.

But, to cinch this I really do think I need more family members to test. It could go either way between William and Joseph!