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.