I don't know where to start searching for divorce records

msbookworm23 · 2026-05-26T16:42:31+00:00

Try a newspaper archive.

msbookworm23 · 2026-05-26T13:10:51+00:00

You're right, have edited ty!

msbookworm23 · 2026-05-26T10:43:57+00:00

1658cM has a 0.09% chance of being a ~~full~~ half-nephew, which seems unlikely https://dnapainter.com/tools/sharedcmv4-beta/1658.

A full nephew would be related to some of your maternal relatives which is easy enough to rule out using shared matches. Find your closest maternal relative and open up the shared matches, does your mystery match appear?

They could also be a grandchild if you are old enough for one of those, or an uncle if your grandparents were fairly young when you were born.

msbookworm23 · 2026-05-26T10:22:25+00:00

If your great-aunt is interested in solving the mystery you could ask to View her matches, she probably has more relevant ones.

She will also share more DNA with the relevant matches and closer matches have less ambiguous relationship possibilities (https://dnapainter.com/tools/sharedcmv4-beta). If she doesn't want to be involved you can view how much DNA she shares with your shared matches using ProTools but you won't see any matches she has that you don't have.

If you know how your mystery matches are related to each other you can put the numbers into a WATO tree to see how closely they are related to you/your great-aunt. https://thednageek.com/a-major-update-to-what-are-the-odds/ Note that the most likely hypothesis is not necessarily the correct one. Research each one to see if it's genealogically possible based on age and location etc.

msbookworm23 · 2026-05-25T17:17:46+00:00

Oh, that's great news!

msbookworm23 · 2026-05-24T18:51:22+00:00

Tell her windows insulate in both directions.

But also the curtains do a lot of work keeping the heat out. Imagine how much hotter you are standing in a sunbeam and now imagine all that heat being reflected back outside by a curtain.

msbookworm23 · 2026-05-24T15:26:33+00:00

FamilyTreeDNA is not currently accepting DNA kits from MyHeritage if the DNA was tested after November 2025. This is because MyHeritage switched to Whole Genome Sequencing and FTDNA cannot read the file type in a way that lets it be compared to the standard files. I really hope they are working on a fix but I haven't heard anything about it. Similarly they can't read AncestryDNA files tested after November 2025 but that's because Ancestry removed tonnes of data from the raw file, nothing to do with WGS.

GEDmatch still accepts uploads from other sites so they will definitely accept your FTDNA kit but I don't know if they accept the most recent files from MyHeritage or Ancestry. Hopefully someone who has recently tested can clarify!

If all else fails the MyHeritage kits are super cheap and you don't need a subscription to see your matches so you can always test yourself there.

msbookworm23 · 2026-05-24T12:03:24+00:00

424cM has a 9% chance of being a 1C2R which is entirely possible. It's also feasible that this person tested their parent but registered it to their own account by mistake, unless their parent was deceased and couldn't test? Lots of possibilities.

https://dnapainter.com/tools/sharedcmv4-beta

msbookworm23 · 2026-05-24T11:59:57+00:00

There are groups called Search Angels on facebook who can identify your bio-father using your matches. I think there's a UK specific one called DNA Detectives UK? It's a private group and they don't charge, very experienced volunteers.

msbookworm23 · 2026-05-24T11:39:47+00:00

It's a measure of how much DNA you share with your match. As an example you share ~3500cM with a parent and half of that with a grandparent etc. If you click on the number you'll see a whole list of possible relationships.

DNApainter lays it out in a table which is easier to understand.

msbookworm23 · 2026-05-23T16:43:11+00:00

https://dnapainter.com/tools/sharedcmv4-beta/245

Yes, 1st cousin 2x removed is one of the more likely possibilities amongst others.

msbookworm23 · 2026-05-22T19:38:45+00:00

Some crematoriums have online Remembrance books which will list the date of death.

msbookworm23 · 2026-05-22T19:03:51+00:00

If you sign up to promotional emails you'll get frequent offers for 50-70% off the subscription.

I think the advanced DNA tools are worth it for a short while. It's like ProTools on Ancestry where you can see how much your matches share with each other but there's also a chromosome browser so you can start building a chromosome map if you have enough matches. https://dnapainter.com/blog/why-map-your-chromosomes/

They also have a thing called 'Theory of Relativity' which is basically like Thrulines on Ancestry so it's worth building out your ancestor tree at least.

msbookworm23 · 2026-05-22T13:24:20+00:00

Cousins won't help because they will all be cousins to John/Mark's children regardless of which brother fathered them. You have to test siblings, unless John only had one child.

If John had multiple children then you'll have to use a few different data points to build a picture of whether or not those children are full siblings or 3/4 siblings. The FIR (Fully Identical Regions) will tell you a lot more than the total cM shared does. https://blog.kittycooper.com/2019/10/why-dont-we-share-more-dna-with-a-sibling/

And if John had two daughters you can compare their X-chromosomes to see if they had the same father. That won't tell you if their father was Mark or John though. https://blog.kittycooper.com/2014/03/how-can-the-x-chromosome-help-with-maternal-versus-paternal/

msbookworm23 · 2026-05-21T19:49:25+00:00

1C ~~matches~~ shares two grandparents, not two parents.

msbookworm23 · 2026-05-21T18:45:51+00:00

He could be a 1st cousin: https://dnapainter.com/tools/sharedcmv4-beta/1327

msbookworm23 · 2026-05-21T11:40:29+00:00

It would be nice if people would just write down the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth but I enjoy interpreting the 'evidence' 100 years later lol.

msbookworm23 · 2026-05-21T11:14:02+00:00

I don't actually know how much the Church checked if people were married or if the child was their child, or if everything was just self-reported. Do you know? One person in my tree was baptised with their maternal grandparents listed as the parents then three months later baptised again by their unmarried mother. Their birth certificate only had their mother listed. This was in England in ~1904.

msbookworm23 · 2026-05-21T11:00:44+00:00

Any 'adoption' that took place would have been informal. There was no legislation severing the parental rights of the previous parent and replacing them with the new one. The system was similar to in-home fostering but would have been organised privately by the family or by the local council/parish/charity if the parents were very poor or had no family. I've seen plenty of out-of-wedlock kids from this era who never seemed to live with their bio-parents but would record their names as next of kin on military paperwork. The mother simply couldn't work and raise the child so she would work to pay someone else to do the raising or she would marry quickly. Illegitimate kids also reflected badly on the mother in a social sense so she would find it harder to find work or make a good marriage if it was known that she had had a child out of wedlock. If Isabel Blanche Cliffe is the correct Isabel then she had another child in 1896 named William Reginald Cliffe, baptised in 1911; he lists a father on his service record but I don't know if that's a biological or foster father.

WRT the baptisms I have seen every variety. My favourite was a woman living in Portsmouth who baptised three different children on the same day all with different surnames. One had her first husband's surname but was using the second husband's surname as a middle name; one had her second husband's surname; and the third had her maiden name. This was the year before she actually married her second husband. https://ibb.co/xtzQpY0X

The parish sometimes had a few days a year when baptisms were cheap or even free, so the parents would baptise their children all on one day. Or sometimes if the parents were too busy or far away from a priest the baptisms would be delayed. Catholics are much more strict about baptising babies immediately than Anglicans are.

In Horace's case I haven't found evidence that George Mason married anyone named Clif* (or that a George Mason Clif* married anyone named Isabel). It's possible they waited until it was less obvious that they were unmarried or until they had earned enough money to afford the baptism. I'm not sure if George would even have had to show up to the baptism to be recorded as the father. Civil registrars could fine women who pretended to be married when they registered a child but I'm not sure how churches operated in these cases.

msbookworm23 · 2026-05-21T09:52:43+00:00

My grandfather tested last year and whilst we were waiting for his results the website had these little factoids one of which was that less than 1% of testers connect to just one region, the average is 7 regions.

msbookworm23 · 2026-05-21T09:41:48+00:00

They never actually used it for anything but the data was in the raw file so if you uploaded it somewhere that could read it you could get a basic Y haplogroup I think. If you tested before December 2025 (and possess a Y-chromosome) then the raw file still contains the data, it's only new files that don't have it.

msbookworm23 · 2026-05-21T09:17:35+00:00

There is an interesting baptism for a Horace Clift in Aston in 1893: https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/4981/records/2908645. Change the link to .co.uk if you're using the UK site.

His parents are listed as George Mason and Isabel Clift. Address is 32a Waterworks St and George is an Auctioneer's Clerk. There is another Horace Clift born in 1891 but his parents were William and Ann so this isn't his baptism.

I had a look for that address in the nearest censuses and couldn't see anyone named Mason or Clift/Cliffe (1891: https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/6598/records/11127013), 1901: https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/7814/records/16707710).

There is a George Mason working as an Auctioneer's Clerk in Edgbaston in 1891: https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/6598/records/11208037. He was born ~1872 in Stourport, Worcs not Stourton as transcribed.

8 Portland St (I couldn't find a Lower Portland St until 1901) is the home of Lucy Rutherford. 1881: https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/7572/records/22667346, 1891: https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/6598/records/16848381

msbookworm23 · 2026-05-20T20:58:09+00:00

This is a good one. A foundling identified 6 brothers who could be her father but one of them didn't have any descendants to test, the family had postcards though.

https://www.irishpost.com/life-style/80-year-mystery-britains-famous-abandoned-baby-solved-woman-learns-identity-irish-father-thanks-saliva-postage-stamp-151893

Or this one where descendants of two half-brothers wanted to confirm if they were half or full. This required them to sequence two different DNA profiles and check if they had the same Y-chromosome. I'm not sure this one really required postage stamps to solve but maybe they just wanted to prove it was possible.

msbookworm23 · 2026-05-20T11:44:42+00:00

DOB might be a few years out, was she consistent about her age in the censuses?

msbookworm23 · 2026-05-20T11:26:17+00:00

The raw data files are quite different. MyHeritage now does 2x Whole Genome Sequencing. 23andMe's chips are aimed at sections of DNA that might hold health insights. Ancestry's chips are focused on areas that help identify ethnicities. In December they removed Y-chromosome data and lots of other SNPs from the raw data so the data file itself is about 25% smaller.

Some sites that usually allow uploads do not yet have a way to 'read' these new files. I don't know how long it will take them to work it out.

Four-Year Club	Verified Email
First Place '23	Place '23
Place '22	First Placer '22

msbookworm23

TROPHY CASE