Janet’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Janet’s maternal grandparents

Sometimes, helping one person with their search ends up helping another, and that is the case with Janet’s search. About two years into Kayla’s search, (a family friend of mine whose search took almost three years to solve), Janet popped up as a match to her.

Janet’s mother Emily had been born and adopted in Australia in early 1917. She had been abandoned on a doorstep as an infant and did not have any adoption information or even a confirmed birthdate.

Janet was a match on Kayla’s paternal grandfather Francis’ side at 399cm. During Kayla’s search, we figured that Francis was Janet’s maternal grandfather. This was due to the age of Francis, Emily, and the DNA centimorgans shared between Kayla and Janet- no other relationship made as much sense (and fit the DNA amount shared between them) as half first cousins did.

Last month, Janet added me as a collaborator to her matches so I could help find her mom’s biological mother. Since we already knew Kayla was from her maternal grandfather’s side, it was easy to split the matches.

Janet had a lot of matches on her maternal grandmother’s line! As I looked through the trees of these matches, I saw that most of the closer ones above 100cm were descended from two couples: Gordon and Sally Payne, and Walter and Martha Payne. Gordon and Walter were brothers, who had married two sisters- Sally and Martha. I figured Janet’s maternal grandmother was going to be the daughter of one of these couples. I also checked to make sure Janet had unique matches only from Gordon and Walter’s side as well as only from Sally and Martha’s side, and she did, confirming that her grandmother was going to be a child of one of the two couples.

I started building a research tree of all the matches from the Payne family. I could see pretty quickly that the matches descended from Walter and Martha were a bit inflated, which was to be expected with the double relation. Walter and Martha’s daughters were all younger than 17 in 1917, so although teen pregnancy could have been a possibility, I knew I would be looking for a daughter of Gordon and Sally.

Gordon and Sally had several daughters that were in the right range to be the biological mother of Emily, and close to the age of Janet’s biological grandfather Francis. Two of the four oldest Payne daughters had descendants that had tested, and they were matching Janet in the right range to be a second cousin once removed, which is what they would be assuming my theories were correct.

The other two daughters, Ada and Myra, seemingly both did not have any children. Myrna got married rather late in life, at age 40. Their family was also from northern New South Wales, and I was looking for any records that would place either of them in Sydney, which was at least half a day of travel time from their hometown.

I then saw something that caught my eye in a New South Wales police gazette from 1914. Ada had been a complainant in a short article about a man that was charged with child desertion. No child was listed in the article, but I wondered if they had had a child together- although no children had been listed in Ada’s obituary.

Thanks to the help of another genealogist, I was able to find a birth index record of a daughter of Ada’s. She had been born in 1913 in a very specific part of Sydney where Janet’s biological grandfather had been living and working at the time. Ada was named on the index, but no father was listed. It is unknown what happened to the child, but it is possible she was placed for adoption.

We reasoned that Ada had conceived Emily just two years after the police gazette article was published, and was not able to raise Emily since Ada was a single unwed mother at the time.

Janet agreed that Ada was very likely to be her mom’s biological mother and was very satisfied with my research. She hopes that descendants of Ada’s other daughter will appear one day on her matchlist.