This is going to be hard.

Finding Miriam was tricky but I don’t even know where to start to find him.

Mystery great grandfather, name unknown, every detail unknown. Who are you?

All I know is the obvious – he was a man who was in the same place as Miriam about nine months before Edna was born.

Even if I can work out who he was through my ancestry DNA matches, are there privacy issues to consider? He isn’t named on birth records, he might not have told anyone or he might not have even known he was a dad.

I can’t just charge in and bother his descendants. “Surprise, here I am, your long lost half second cousin twice removed!”

But… these people did do an ancestry DNA test. Life and DNA are full of surprises and there’s bound to be some surprise connections from an ancestry DNA test, right?

I’m getting ahead of myself! I have to find him first…

From my top 50 DNA matches I can disregard ones that I’ve figured out how we are connected.

That leaves about 28 mystery DNA matches.

The top of my list of mystery matches is number 6 on my entire list of 33,000+ matches. She is a very strong match in the scheme of things, to the extent that I feel I should know who she is but I don’t. Maybe she is descended from mystery great grandfather, and maybe not, but for now I want to know who she is and how we are connected.

Actually, no, not ‘want’ to know, make that ‘need‘ to know!

She needs a better name than ‘she’ but it wouldn’t be right to name her so I’m going to call her …sh…’E’.

I don’t know E and I’m fairly sure that E doesn’t know me. We’ve never met and possibly never will. But, E, you just became my new best friend. E is going to help me solve a mystery without even knowing she did it.

Our DNA match says we are 67% likely to be second cousins or half first cousins once removed. What does that mean???

E and I share DNA with a lot of the mystery matches but we also share DNA with a known match – my cousin’s daughter. (In relationship terms we call my cousin my first cousin and her daughter is called my first cousin once removed. Just to confuse things, the child of my grand aunt or uncle is also called a first cousin once removed!)

My first cousin and I share Edna as our grandmother. Because E, my cousin and I all share DNA that means E is somehow connected to Edna – perhaps she is descended from Edna or perhaps she is descended from one of Edna’s half-siblings.

Ancestry DNA says its 67% likely that we share or half share a great grandparent. Do E and I share Miriam… do we share mystery great grand-daddy? (I’m calling him MG from here – Mystery Great)

E doesn’t have a family tree attached to her DNA results which is a bummer but maybe I can get around that. I’m a match with E and we’re mutually matched with others in my mystery match list. Those others, if they have trees attached, well quite frankly their trees really really matter.

I’ve spent some time staring at the mystery match family trees. Some of the trees are private so I can’t look at them. Some of the trees have two or three people in them so they’re not helpful. Some of the trees are full of people, but I don’t recognise anyone in them.

And that’s good.

If I’m on the right track to find MG, I probably shouldn’t recognise any of them unless MG is someone familiar – and I don’t think he will be anyone I’ve heard of.

The more I look at the mystery trees the more I can see a theme developing. They have people with surnames in common and the names are jumping out at me…

Weston, Collman, Williams… MG, are you in there? O MG, who are you?