2018 Genealogy/DNA Breakthrough

A reader reports...

Until a few years ago, I had a full and bushy ancestral tree, well documented and a source of great pride. Many lines were fully supported with DNA testing. Then uneasiness began to creep in upon me as, first, a DNA mismatch with a second cousin occurred, then, slowly, as I began to realize I had no solid matches to anyone in my paternal line. I had chalked it up to the fact that all were German and “those pesky Germans were too secretive to engage in DNA testing.” Then finally I was hit on the head with the finding that two more cousins were not related. It was time to accept that I had a problem with my dad’s thoroughly documented tree.

It was easy to jump to the conclusion that he was adopted because I always knew my grandmother had been married almost ten years when he was born, an only child. Armed with a single DNA match that was almost certainly on my paternal side and who was a sympathetic tester with an excellent tree, I proceeded to research every possible angle. Then a match popped up on my grandmother’s side, dad’s mother. Then another, and another. The focus now changed from adoption to affair. Of course. I could easily rationalize that my secretive German grandmother took things into her own hands. Realizing that she would never become pregnant with her husband’s child (perhaps mumps had rendered all the boys but one sterile), she decided to have an affair aimed at getting pregnant. Interestingly, her grandmother, with whom she had lived until she was 15, was a midwife in early Portland, Oregon. She may have been wiser than most.

My research now switched to finding that one eligible male. There was no Y-DNA to test, no names, no clues. But there were new DNA matches slowly trickling in that also matched that first person. I was an early adopter of DNA testing and either tested with or transferred to every new company as it appeared on the scene. Gedmatch has helped me topple brick walls and solidify many lines but not this one. My first breakthrough had been at Ancestry, then another at 23andMe, then FamilyTreeDNA and MyHeritage. None would transfer to Gedmatch, and I was stymied until DNAPainter came along. I began to see some patterns emerge, but there was no clarity until RootsFinder came on the scene in 2018. Now I was able to see some clues from Gedmatch and combine them with those already at DNAPainter. Working cross-platform, I had a true breakthrough. Building out the resulting trees led me straight to a doctor who lived and practiced not far from my grandparents’ home. As I researched him, the thought occurred to me that perhaps he had practiced artificial insemination on my grandmother, and it was not an affair at all. I began to study the origin of AI and discovered there was a doctor who was first experimenting with it on dogs about the time my newly discovered grandfather was a student in medical school at Columbia University. It wasn’t a huge leap to conclude that my Dr. grandfather might have done some experimenting of his own. Certainly there were no rules in those days, no sperm banks, no reason to think a doctor would not use this technique or any other to cure an ailing patient. The fact that her ailment was her husband’s infertility was a perfect foil.

DNA matches continue to pile up as my research into his family continues, but the cherry on top was discovering that this doctor delivered my dad. He signed his birth certificate in 1905! I like to think he might have been the family doctor who treated my painful ear infection when I was about four years old, lying in agony on my grandparents’ couch until that wonderful lancing relieved it. This part of the story I will never know. But I do know that my dad’s family was not all German. In fact, his paternal line is exclusively English, thus accounting for all the English found in my ethnicity reports.

The moral to this story is never give up.