How worthwhile is DNA in this situation?

[RebeccasoldercousinSusie]

Hi all,

I have recently started to compile my family tree via Ancestry.

I have done ok so far and have lots of hints still to work through for much older relatives.

However, one thing I do not know is my grandfather’s real father. He was “illegitimate” but raised by his mother’s husband and took his name as a young boy. No father on birth certificate.

The only information we have is fairly anecdotal but suggests that my GF’s biological father was of Jewish descent.

Nothing else and no living relatives can help. I’m not even sure if my GF was ever told who his bio father was. He knew the man who raised him was his step father though.

Would DNA help in this situation? He was born in 1909.

I am very new to this and quite clueless.

Well it might, but it depends what you want to find out. Many people accept the "step father" as the real family irrespective of genetics, but it you're more interested in uncovering the real father then DNA is the way to go.

Best option is a bog standard Ancestry DNA test (autosomal). This will look at your full DNA profile and suggest matches on both your maternal and paternal lines along with giving an estimate of ethnicity - this should confirm/deny your Jewish theory.

Whether it helps you find your relatives though will depend on who else has tested. I have thousands of matches but they are all very very distant, many going back to couples in the 1800-1850 timeframe. But you might get lucky and match with people who don't fit into what you know about your family and who therefore might be related through the unknown parent. You;ll get better matches if you test your parent rather than you as it's one generation closer to the mystery.

Would advise joining some of the the genetic genealogy facebook groups, there are some specialising in Jewish DNA which is notoriously complex due to intermarriage , 19th/20th century migrations (and the Holocaust) and name changing.

Thank you @MarshmallowFondant that is really helpful.

I am intrigued about my biological family but do very much accept my GF’s step father as being his family and will continue to trace them too. They were very important in my GF’s life and my mum’s too at points.

But would be really interested to know more. I don’t think I want to necessarily track specific people - would love to know who his father was and I think other members of the family would be intrigued too, but I doubt very much that we are likely to ever find this out - it seems to have been kept a secret for some reason - I can guess at what some of those reasons might be of course.

Sadly my mum passed away earlier this year. Which makes me very sad as I have traced half siblings of hers, and she would loved to have met them. It was so easy too 😞 so I cannot get her DNA and I’m not sure my aunts would be keen - but willing to give mine a shot anyway.

Agree it's worth a shot.

You don't need to contact anyone. When matches pop up on Ancestry you can click through to see any trees they have built to try to identify the possible father.

A great tool is the Shared Centimorgan project dnapainter.com/tools/sharedcmv4 - when you get your matches, the number will be expressed as cM which is centimorgan. Plug in your numbers and it will tell you the potential relationships between you and your match and the probabilities.

So for example a match sharing 275 centimorgans is 60% likely to be a half great great aunt/uncle, 2nd cousin, half first cousin once removed, or a half great great niece/nephew. Looking at ages and other details might help you quickly rule out some of those possibilities.

DNA could help, but you'd need to be lucky and find that enough people related to him had signed up and also had trees you could refer to to build the picture. You may also need to do a bit of detective work with records to narrow things down, and be prepared for records to not be accurate if they were trying to hide something!

I've got a similar situation in my family, with my dad's grandfather and great grandfather! Through DNA and a lot of detective work I've worked out who his great grandfather was, but still don't have enough to work out his grandfather.

Thanks both! Looks like I’ve got a lot of work to do, but that DNA might be a good start.

@MarshmallowFondant thanks for the tips about DNA. I am clueless about it all.

If you can get your dad or someone from his side to get their DNA done too it helps - means you can see when people are related to him which simplifies trying to find your mum's side a bit!

Ah not possible sadly - my dad passed away a few years ago. I didn’t meet him until I was an adult and have no relationship with any of my paternal family.

I’m only tracing my maternal side - I hadn’t even considered that matches would come back on my dad’s side! Can’t believe I didn’t even think of that 😂

Whether it helps you find your relatives though will depend on who else has tested.

I always think that this is the best answer to the question.

Having done my DNA after an NPE situation, I would quickly have realised that my dad was not my dad but, as results stand, I doubt I'd have been able to identify my biological dad.