The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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8:57am on Tuesday, 8th November, 2022:
Anecdote
I received an email recently telling me of a DNA match on Ancestry.com . The grandaughter of one of my mother's cousins (so a second cousin once removed from me) got in touch to say hello.
I mentioned this to my mother and she was a little concerned. It turns out that my mother's cousin (who was the daughter of one of my grandfather's sisters) had been born in 1943. The cousin's mother (my mum's aunt) had managed to get pregnant while her husband was away fighting in the war. This was fairly obvious to everyone in the village so was common knowledge, but the expected showdown did not occur when the soldier returned home. He accepted the child as his own, on the grounds that he hadn't exactly been faithful while he was away either. My mother isn't sure whether her cousin (who died in 2017) ever knew that the man she thought of as her father wasn't biologically related to her.
I expect that this kind of thing happened a lot during the war, and with DNA ancestry tests now commercialised then more will come to the fore. There were probably more anyway — another of my mother's aunts had six children in peacetime, at least three of whom weren't her uncle's.
Fortunately, the young woman who contacted me thought it was a bit of a laugh to learn that her grandmother's father wasn't the man her great-grandmother was married to. It'll be interesting to find out if further DNA matches reveal who the actual biological father was.
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