My parents and I had often spoken about our family history. Three of my grandparents were alive when I was born but none of my great grandparents. In fact four of my grandparents were alive but I didn’t know that until my parents, my brother and I did DNA tests.
Mum’s DNA matches were lots of her cousins that she knew or who we knew of from family reunions I had helped run back in the 1980’s and were on my database. But there were a few unknown names in Dad’s DNA matches.
Now came the challenge – how were they related to my dad?
Dad’s paternal line should have been the surname WYATT and his maternal line should have been SMITH.
From what I knew of dad’s paternal side, his father had deserted him and his mother when dad was two and there were no other children from the marriage. But his father had been married before and had two children from that marriage. I could find no matches relating to them. Another person with the surname Wyatt but living in New South Wales had been in contact with me and thought her grandfather and my grandfather were the same person. So we had her dad test DNA as well – another half brother for dad. But all my research on the Wyatt name from the paper work we had was getting us nowhere for 20 years until suddenly another DNA match with the surname ALLEN came up as a close match. We worked out he was a half nephew to my dad. His father had the surname Allen and he was older than my dad. Over 20 years research to work out dad’s father was actually William Elvis Allen and not William Allen Wyatt.
Now Dad’s other challenge was the surname Smith. I had done a lot of research on dad’s supposed grandfather and his father who was a half Samoan whaling captain. But dad’s DNA had no Samoan ethnicity. So I asked a few of the Smith relatives to test. They all had Samoan and they all matched each other. But Dorothy, who I had met on a bus tour and while chatting worked out we were related through Captain Smith, did not match my dad at all. She matched the other Smith cousins. From this we worked out dad’s grandfather was not the son of the whaling captain but someone else.
The close unknown matches on dad’s DNA came back to the surname DAWSON. After more researching, I worked out dad’s grandfather had been a miner on the west coast of Tasmania at the same time as the Smiths were there woodcutting and whaling.
Below are links to posts I’ve already written about these families.
Readers: Have you had both a bigamist and a NPE (non parental event) in your family tree?
