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.
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