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For a while now, my dad has had a DNA match to another person at the level of 43 cMs and 3 segments, which is not an insignificant amount of DNA. They also match me and my son. As much as I tried, I couldn’t find the connection between our families.
Then finally, the grand-daughter of the other person recognised a mutual DNA match and crucially, which side of her family this match was on. This narrowed down where I needed to go looking in her tree.
The grandmother had a great-grandfather called Sydney Herbert Hall who they knew very little about. There was no mention on Sydney’s birth, baptism or marriage records of who his father might have been. Even his mother proved elusive, a Lucy Hall with no other details. Sydney (also spelt Sidney) was born in Cheetham, Manchester, on 4th May 1864 and my Dando family, including William Elbert and his father Joseph, also lived in the same area during that period.
A section of Sydney Herbert Hall’s birth certificate showing no father (click to enlarge)
As time went on, further people tested their DNA and the other DNA match now has a number of matches going back on the Dando line, adding more evidence for the connection to our family.
So what is the background to all of this?
When in 1879, William Elbert Dando tried to seek a divorce from my 2 x great-grandmother, Sarah Louisa Oliver, there was an interesting paragraph in the Times Newspaper…
“It appeared that in 1863 the petitioner [William Dando] had sought for an introduction to the respondent from having seen her portrait in a friend’s album and had at once proposed marriage to her. Her father, who was a large farmer near Doncaster, at first opposed any engagement, but soon withdrew his objections. At the end of three months, however, the engagement was broken off, and they do not appear to have met again for years.”
It’s interesting to note the date here. Sydney was probably conceived in August 1863. It’s possible the news got out and this may be why Sarah’s father initially objected to the engagement or perhaps it’s why the engagement was broken off. This is speculation of course.
There’s a twist though. Any scandal might have actually been concerning William’s father, Joseph Dando, the Younger. Could he have been Sydney’s father in view of him also living in Cheetham in the early 1860’s? He lost his fifth wife, Harriet, in March 1863 and was by then over 60 years old. Nevertheless, he married a 20 year old woman in 1866 in Belfast and had three children with her so he was obviously not behind the door. We don’t know how old Lucy Hall was but one presumes she was a fairly young woman at the time she had Sydney.
Joseph and William’s business partnership was dissolved by mutual consent in 1864 and, whilst we see Joseph in Ireland in 1866, William stayed on in Manchester until about 1871. It seems that no-one laid claim to being Sydney’s father. Was Lucy ignored, paid off or is it possible she never revealed her pregnancy to the Dando family? We just don’t know.
It’s not easy to judge the expected amount of shared DNA at this level to know whether the culprit was the father or the son. I wonder whether, in the future, any more information will come to the surface to give us a clearer understanding of the truth.
