New information gleaned from oral interview

Some exciting new information has come to light about my grandfather's whereabouts following the 1911 census. It came through an interview I did with my oldest living relative, my aunt Gillian. I conducted the interview via Zoom using the recording function, then transcribed the important parts into my notes. Here is what I learnt:

My aunt travelled to Europe with her friend in the fifties. While in London, she visited several  elderly relatives, among them her father's uncle, Uncle Alf. This would have been Grandad's mother's youngest brother whom I had on record as Alfred Parker. According to my aunt, Uncle Alf was like a father to her dad and her Dad was very fond of him.

 "He was a big man and he was a lovely man," said my aunt Gillian. "He really was. He and his wife, they were very happy and they lived very simply. At that stage, I didn't really take much notice, I went over there, we had a cup of tea, and that was Uncle Alf sorted out." She added, "To us, he was old. I don't know what age they were but to us they were old, whereas we were young, we were hitching around Europe."

Hearing my aunt talk about her visit, I was surprised. According to what I had found out so far, Alfred was born in 1884 in Marylebone and was living with his widowed mother Jane in both the 1901 and 1911 censuses. This had led me to assume Alfred had never married but I was wrong. Preliminary research turned up a record on  Family Search that showed he married Florence Edith Harper in 1912.

Even more surprising was the information that Alfred was like a father to David. Did this mean David had lived with Alfred and his wife? The 1911 census showed that David was at the home of his maternal aunt and uncle, Emily and William Smith, in St John's Wood. Now I wondered if he had just been visiting, or if he had moved in with Alfred and Florence when they married the following year.

I did my best to imagine how the relationship between Alfred and David had developed.  Alfred would have been 18 at the time David was born. He would have been 25 when David's father, David Scott Ritchie Sr, was admitted to the Hanwell asylum. The Hanwell admission records show that he was with Emily and William in 1909, which is where he was in 1911 as well. Perhaps, then, he did only move in with Alfred after Alfred got married. The marriage certificate might provide clues but even more useful would be the 1921 census, showing where David was living at age 19. Access to the 1921 census is currently prohibited by the 100-year privacy rule but that restriction will fall away next year.

  I'm not sure what year my aunt visited Uncle Alf in London. The record on Family Search states that Alfred died in 1956 at the age of 72. Gillian would have been 24 at the time. I doubt she and her friend would have travelled to Europe earlier than that, so her memory of him as an old man was accurate.

My aunt Gillian is 88 going on 89 as I write this, and in very good health. It's truly a privilege to be able to learn family history from her first-hand accounts. Speaking to her gave me some excellent leads which I will be following up with online research and assistance from a professional genealogist. Look out for more information as I come across it!

Photo credit: "Wood Marylebone, Marylebone, NW1" by Ewan Munro

 

An alternative origin story for David Scott Ritchie of Paddington

My last post on this blog reported  on a DNA connection between my aunt, born Gillian Margaret Scott-Ritchie, and her cousins who emigrated to Canada. The genetic link confirmed that my grandfather David Scott Richie was definitely the biological son of David Scott Ritchie Sr, the slight-looking man in the photo from Hanwell Asylum published elsewhere on the blog.

This left me with a conundrum. How could I explain Grandad's aristocratic appearance? More puzzling still, who funded his education and facilitated his entry into the burgeoning computer industry?

Finally, I dared to ask the question, What if  Maude, my great-grandmother, wasn't Grandad's biological mother? It would certainly explain the absence of a birth certificate. It would also account for the fact that  Maude wasn't part of my mother and aunt's life growing up. Documents show that she didn't even live with my grandfather from the time he was about 7, choosing instead to have him live with her sister Emily.

Here is a possible version of events, based on what I know about the way things worked in London society at the turn of the twentieth century:

David Scott Ritchie worked as a footman for the Viscount Francis Wheler Hood and Edith Lydia Drummond Hood. He charmed a young girl of aristocratic birth who either lived at the house or came to stay. When it emerged that the girl was pregnant, her parents were appalled. However, they happened to be people of good character, so they made arrangements for the child to be taken care of. Picking another of the servants, a young, responsible woman named Maude Alice Parker, they organised a marriage between David Scott Sr and Maude Alice before the expected birth and set them up at 22 Albert Street. They even established a fund to ensure that the child would receive a proper education.

All might have gone according to plan had not David Scott Ritchie Sr suffered an attack of insanity in 1909 and been institutionalised. The fact that he was first seen at the local workhouse and lived out the rest of his life in a paupers' asylum indicates how hard up he and Maude were. Yet their son, my grandfather, left school and landed a job with an engineering company who transferred him to South Africa at the age of 28 to head up their newest branch.

I have a good feeling about this version of events. If it is true, it would explain why my grandfather never spoke about his early life. Knowing there was a secret surrounding his birth and how he came to be at a good school, he would have been obliged to keep the facts hidden.

The same goes for me if I should discover the identity of the young girl through my DNA research. The next question I have to answer is, How do I create a family tree that is private so i can continue building it with historical records without compromising anyone else's privacy?

Photo credit: Image from page 265 of"The Linzee family of Great Britain and the United States of America and the allied families of Penfold, Hood, Amory, Tilden, Hunt, Browne, Wooldridge [and] Evans".

 1917,; Linzee, John William, by Internet Archive Book Images.

 

Finally, a real breakthrough!

My work with DNA relatives is finally paying off. After feeling overwhelmed for several months by an influx of notifications about people whose names I couldn’t match with my Ritchie ancestors, There has finally been a breakthrough.

The breakthrough came via an email from My Heritage offering me a theory of relativity. The theory concerns a person who is genetically related to both my aunt and me. The person is a woman in her forties. While the website gives no details about her apart from her name, it does point to a shared ancestor; namely, William Ritchie, the brother of my great-grandfather David Scott Ritchie Sr.

Here is a summary of the family connection:

William Ritchie was the eldest son of his father William and mother Emma ELIZA, born Hillyard. It appears he may have been born before his parents married because his birth was in Stratford, England in 1871 and his parents' marriage took place in 1873. At any rate, other siblings soon followed. His brother David Scott [my great-grandfather] was born in 1873. Then came Thomas Scott in 1879, and lastly, Susan Elizabeth in 1882.

William grew up in the latter years of the nineteenth century and married Ada Sarah Ann Burfoot around the start of the twentieth century. The couple settled in Brixton, Lambeth. When their three sons came along, they continued the tradition of repeating family names. William and Ada's eldest son, born in 1902, was named William. Their second son, born in 1903, was named David Scott. Their third son, born in 1904, was named Thomas Scott. Note that these three boys were my grandfather's cousins, although it is unlikely that the families spent time together. As mentioned elsewhere on this blog, from 1909, my great-grandfather was in Hanwell, an asylum for the insane, and my great-grandmother's primary support network comprised her sisters.

William was a furniture dealer and must have done quite well because, for a while around the time of the 1911 census, his mother Emma Eliza and her second husband James Lavell lived with William and Ada in Wandsworth. [William's father had died of ptomaine poisoning in 1882, after which Emma Eliza had remarried.[

Perhaps the fact that his mother was provided for gave William the freedom and confidence to launch out in a new direction. Perhaps his brother David Scott's institutionalisation at Hanwell made him want to take his wife and sons as far away from London as possible. Whatever the case, the family emigrated to Canada in 1913 and settled in Saskatchewan.

 David Scott, William's second son, grew up and married Lula Bell Samuels in 1927. The couple had just one daughter named Dorothy Elizabeth Ritchie, born in Melville, Saskatchewan in 1928. David and Lula Belle lived in Melville until David's death in 1972 and Lula Belle's death in 1982.

Dorothy Elizabeth Ritchie married a man called Charles Edward Stewart. They lived in Melville and had four children. It is one of their daughters whose DNA test reveals her relationship with my aunt and me. This person is my aunt's second cousin twice removed according to My Heritage's theory of relativity, and my third cousin once removed.

I contacted this DNA relative in the hope that she will be interested in exchanging information and photographs about William Ritchie's family with me. Perhaps she will be intrigued to know she has cousins living in South Africa. For me, the importance of this breakthrough is primarily the establishment of a genetic link between myself and the family of William Ritchie, son of William and Emma Eliza. Doubt has always existed about my grandfather's origins on account of his striking resemblance to Henry Duke of Gloucester. A solid DNA link to his documented family of origin means this long-standing family mystery will at last be put to bed.

Which leaves just one question: Is the resemblance to Henry Duke of Gloucester apparent in other members of William Ritchie's family? I hope to find out.

Photo credit: "Little Saskatchewan" by Richard Turenne.

New and surprising possibilities arising from my study of shared DNA matches

The lockdown in South Africa has created more time for pastimes like family history research. This week, I've had fun devoting several days to working through my DNA matches, Looking specifically for relatives on the Ritchie side. In this post, I will summarise my method for finding missing information and lay out my findings thus far.

As mentioned earlier in this blog, I tested my DNA through 23andMe in early 2019. The platform has some really useful features, including a place to make notes on the profile page of every one of my DNA relatives. I use this area to write down interesting facts about each person, such as whether they list a significant family name and which branch of my family they might belong to. I also keep track of when i message them, as well as anything they tell me by return message.

Last year, i took advantage of a special offer and had my aunt’s DNA tested as well. She is the daughter of David Scott Ritchie and Florence Sanderson, the only remaining relative I have in that generation. This time the test was done through My Heritage. I copied my results from 23andMe and added them to My Heritage. This let me compare our results with a view to clarifying which set of relatives I should focus on.

Both 23andMe and My Heritage offer excellent features for amateur genealogists. Furthermore, each has its own database of new matches. Using them together, I came up with my own little treasure hunt that kept me absorbed for hours.

The method involvs listing the surnames on my aunt’s chart of DNA relatives, then searching for those surnames among my 1400-odd matches on 23andMe. Here is an example of what I was able to learn:

One of the surnames on my aunt's list was Knight. when I turned to my list of DNA relatives on 23andMe and typed Knight into the search bar, seven results came up. The strongest match was someone with the surname H and the name Knighton on their surname list. Not very encouraging at first glance, until I discovered that the name Bland was there as well. Bland is the surname of my great-grandfather's mother, but on my grandmother Florence Sanderson's side, not David's

Further investigation showed that another relative linked to the surname Knight may have come from East London, which is where Florence Sanderson [Sandy] was born. I messaged the person to ask for more information. If the Knight surname does indeed belong on Florence's side, I will need to pursue some of the other, apparently weaker, surname matches to identify the ones that belong on David's side.

Meanwhile, I made what I thought was an exciting discovery on 23andMe. I found a DNA match with the surname Hilliard, a version of which belongs firmly on David's side. Emma Eliza Hillyard was the mother of David Scott Ritchie Sr, my great-grandfather. On the profile page of this DNA relative, I wrote excitedly, "I messaged her on 20 April 2020. It is very possible that we are related through the parents of William Hillyard [born about 1830 in Suffolk], who was the father of Emma Eliza Hillyard. If this turns out to be so, the DNA link will confirm my genetic connection to David Ritchie Sr, and thereby prove that Grandad was not adopted."

The reply I received didn't sound very hopeful, however. The person concerned provided lots of interesting information about her branch of the Hilliard family but they live in Australia and have little information about their English roots.

Undaunted, I visited the profiles of all the DNA relatives shared by my Hilliard relative and me in an effort to confirm the connection to Emma Eliza. Initially, I was encouraged because many of them either live in the UK or can trace their roots to Great Britain. however, one DNA relative put paid to this hope. He came up as a shared relative between me and someone who is almost certainly connected to me through my Dutch ancestors.

Even so, there is a glimmer of hope. My Hilliard relative is over ninety and lived for some time in the Netherlands after WWII. It is possible that our shared relative with links to Holland may be a young person descended from one of her children. 

If that is the case, it may completely scramble my theories up to this point. I have been confidently placing anyone with hints of Dutch ancestry on my father's side of the family, since his mother descended from a very large and established family in the Rotterdam area. Now it looks as though several of  these DNA relatives with links to Holland may, in fact, all fit on my mother's side. How fascinating! I might actually be close to a breakthrough!

Photo credit: "Amsterdam canal houses by Johan Teyler (1648 -1709)" Original from The Rijksmuseum. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.

Refining my search for DNA relatives

I had intended to keep this blog updated regularly but, unfortunately, I have let my reporting lapse. This is a catch-up post. Contrary to the way things appear, I have made some progress in my search for my grandfathers background.

Most importantly, my cousin and I took a decision at the end of 2019 to get my aunts DNA assessed. We ordered the kit from My Heritage and my aunt supplied a sample for analysis. When the results came back, I uploaded my own DNA results from 23andMe to My Heritage so the two samples could be compared. This made it possible to separate the DNA relatives on my maternal grandparents’ side from the DNA relatives on my paternal grandparents’ side

Even so, the process of tracing family lines is fairly complicated. Most of the DNA relatives that come up are third to sixth cousins. They could relate to people in my grandmother Sandy’s lying and not my grandfather David’s line. I will have to keep plugging away until I find DNA relatives with surnames I recognise or, at least, from distinctive locations in the UK before i can say for sure that a particular grouping of matches belongs to David himself.

Other news is that I have made an application for David Scott Ritchie’s unabridged death certificate in the hope that it will show his place of birth. As described earlier in this blog, all attempts to find his birth certificate have been in vain. In order to apply for UK citizenship, I need some sort of official documentation proving that he was born in England. The unabridged death certificate should, theoretically, have this information on it although I still don’t know whether it does because it has not yet been found. This in spite of the fact that I have been waiting on the South African Department of Home Affairs for a full 12 months.

Such are the challenges of tracing ones lineage! I could get frustrated but prefer to keep a positive outlook and regard it all as one big, fascinating adventure. When all is said and done, the past is the past and we must live in the present.
Photo credit: "DNA Kit" by Geoff Stearns.