So this it it, this is the only other picture I’ve ever seen of Edna, my paternal grandmother.

Edna is the youngest one, second from the right. How old does she look to you? The dresses look like they belong in the 1940s.

She’s not exactly smiling, or it looks a little forced, which makes me sad – two pictures is all I might ever have of her, both of them unhappy ones.

I have always wondered who she is with. They could be Dorney women or Willock women… let’s face it, they could be simply anyone. When I look at them, I see a mother and her daughters.

Over the years I’ve tried everything I can think of to work it out. For a long time, I’ve worked on a theory that these are Dorney women and because they look so much alike, one of Edna’s biological parents must be a Dorney… maybe, just maybe, one of these Dorney women is Edna’s mother, is May Willock.

It makes sense, right? I mean of course you would lie about your name if you were having an illegitimate baby in 1909, and how often were those illegitimate babies just absorbed into the family and raised by their grandmother? If I allowed myself to believe that, the mystery was solved, near enough.

But I’m not that kind of girl. Near enough isn’t good enough. And so I’ve kept at this for more than 20 years.

I tried contacting other people who were doing Dorney family history, looking for answers and maybe other photographs, but so far I haven’t found anyone who has any information or photographs of anyone that looks like these women.

I once found a very grainy photograph of two little girls in dad’s belongings, their names were clearly written on the back. They were his Dorney cousins, who will remain nameless in respect for their privacy.

It took a while, but I managed to track them down. I wasn’t sure they would agree to talk to me but when they saw that I genuinely had a photograph of themselves, they were as excited as I was to have found each other after what must have been 60 years of separation.

It turned out they were dad’s second cousins, a bit removed from everything in dad’s family, and they were only very little when he went away. They recognised themselves in the picture, of that there was certainty. They remembered my dad… sort of. They knew vaguely of him, but didn’t know anything about him. They they thought they recognised his face… maybe. They recognised Edna’s face but they were non-committal about the group of women in the photograph. Maybe these were their Dorney aunts and maybe not. Their Dorney great grandmother died before they were born so they never saw her, or any photographs of her. Just like me, there was no one alive in their family who could have shed any light on anything. One thing is certain, dad must have felt connected to the two little cousins to have kept their picture with him all his life.

After so many years of searching, I would so dearly love to get to the truth about Edna and her biological mother, the elusive May Willock. I have a zillion little questions, but life is easier if I narrow them down to this:

Who on Earth was ‘May Willock’, the woman who gave birth to Edna in 1909 and then seems to have mysteriously vanished from the records?

Why on Earth did Edna abandon her boys to the St Joseph’s Home for Boys’ in Kincumber in 1940?

For the past few years I’ve considered taking an ancestry DNA test. It might solve the first mystery, but for a range of reasons each time the thought popped up I talked myself out of it fairly quickly. Instead I consigned myself to an endless search through records, looking for information that doesn’t exist, and to the endless treadmill of looking one more time at the same stuff to find the same nothing.

What is that old saying about the definition of doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? Is it stupidity? Probably. In that case, I say E-nough!!!

Its decision time. Either try looking for the answers in science or give it up as one of history’s unsolvable mysteries.

Just before Christmas the ancestry DNA test kit was on special.

What would it hurt to buy one? After all, I don’t have to use it, right?

On 11 December my test kit arrived in the mail. Might think about it for a while.

Who was I kidding!?!

My tube of spit was in that big red mailbox and on the way to the lab before you could say “tube of spit”. No turning back now!

I’m not a patient person. I wanted a pre-Christmas result. Ha ha!! Days turned into weeks that felt like years.

My results arrived last week, which is probably a quick turn-around.

I’m like a kid with a new toy, a dog with a juicy new bone, a chubby little pig in a sloppy new mud puddle.

I am officially addicted and obsessed with picking through all of my DNA matches with people I have never heard of, looking for new clues.

AD – DIC – TED!!

You won’t believe what I’ve found out…