The Lost Family by Libby Copeland

This book really resonated for me. I first tested with Ancestry nearly 20 years ago and as time went by and I started to fill my tree I became aware of an interesting dilemma.

Both my parents were only children and although I knew my father’s wider family, after my mother’s mother died we lost all contact with her siblings. My maternal grandparents were Jewish, my grandmother Sarah one of 11 siblings and grandfather George one of 13. A lot of people to lose track of! My mother had a close but difficult relationship with Sarah who she said appeared to resent her very existence. “You would never have been born if your sister hadn’t died” was a common jibe.

I started building my tree after my mother’s death in 2005 needing more of a sense of who I was and DNA tested a couple of years later with no real understanding of what the results meant. I registered with lots of sites and was eventually contacted by a second cousin in the US whose grandfather (Sarah’s only brother) had pulled together a family tree in the 1960’s having written to all his sisters to gain up to date information about their descendants. This cousin was in touch with a couple of others and so the family started to grow as did the DNA matches to Sarah’s family as the years went by along with my understanding of what the results meant.

Then the questions started. Why, if both my mother’s parents were Jewish, were my sister and I less than 30%? Why did I keep getting maternal matches to people several generations back who were farmers in East Anglia? I contacted several of my DNA matches who seemed to descend from the same East Anglian family and eventually focussed on a Martha who appeared to be a direct ancestor of mine and also of the cousin I was in touch with in Australia.

Martha’s grandson William was married to one of my grandmother Sarah’s nine sisters, Julia.  William was not a direct relation of mine and there was no reason for me to match to his family. Julia’s grandson, J, is my second cousin in Australia. I asked J what he thought and he sent me some family history notes his father had written so that there was a record before he died. He described William as a bit of a rogue, an East End publican, who had added Jacob to his name so that he could marry Julia in the synagogue by pretending to be Jewish. J also told me that he had been contacted by a woman in Canada claiming William was her father, so there was “history”. At this point J had not done a DNA test preferring to wait until they were more established.

It still didn’t really make sense. Sarah and George married in 1909 but my mother wasn’t born until 1918. There had been talk of a sister who died which I explored and found the birth of an Elizabeth in 1917 who died 3 months later of gastroenteritis.

Why did Sarah always tell my mother “you don’t know what I had to go through to have you” and why did she always seem so resentful of her?

Somehow it looked as though genetically William was my grandfather not George. This was supported for me by the fact that even though George was one of 13 children, all of whom made it to adulthood life and had families, I have never had a single DNA match to any of them.

Then early one morning about 5 years ago I had a message from J who had just received his My Heritage DNA test results and “guess what” he said …”we’re first cousins”.  A problem solved but it raised so many more questions which I will never be able to answer.

George died a year before I was born. My mother adored him, my grandmother tolerated him over nearly 40 years of marriage. I’m grateful for the insights and knowledge but also for the fact that I didn’t have to tell my mother about any of this as she would have been devastated!

For me there’s a whole quadrant of my family tree that I have stopped pursuing. I feel I have no right to claim George as my grandfather, and no desire to claim William without knowing why he did it which I never will. I do know that Sarah and Julia remained close though so perhaps William was just helping out a childless couple?

Kate (SoG book club member)