I’ve worked really hard on this and I’m not going to bore you with the details. I’m cutting right to the chase. Since my last post I’ve worked out a few things. I know exactly who E is, but I definitely don’t know her, she’s a stranger to me. I’ve also worked out how the…
Category: A DNA journey
Who are you? – Edna, part 9
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…
The Mother Lode – Edna, part 8
Ok, so Mabel Willock isn’t Edna’s mother. Does that mean Mabel’s sister Miriam has to be Edna’s mother, that Miriam must be May Willock? Well… Maybe… What do I know about Miriam Willock? She was born in Molong New South Wales in 1884, just down the road from Wellington, which is where May Willock said…
How Mabel lost her money – Edna, part 7
May Willock. My great grandmother. Edna’s mother. Who was she? My DNA results point to one of two sisters – Miriam or Mabel Willock. But which one? Either of the girls could reasonably have gone by the name May Willock; Miriam perhaps had May as her middle name, or May could be a shortened form…
Tree lines and bloodlines – Edna, part 6
I have to admit, when I first looked at my DNA results I thought it was a lost cause. I apparently have more than 33,000 matches in the database. How would I ever make sense of the sea of DNA matches with people I have never heard of? So I shut the tool down, opened…
The truths we tell ourselves – Edna, part 5
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…
Kincumber Boys Home – Edna, part 4
It is 1940. You are 8. Your brothers are 5 and 3. One morning your mother leaves the house, taking your brothers with her. She comes home without them, and then she leaves again, this time taking your sister with her. She doesn’t come back. Not tomorrow, not next week. She’s gone, and so are…
The Dorneys of Waterloo – Edna, part 3
Before I knew that Edna’s surname was Willock, I was looking for Dorneys in Waterloo or Redfern. There was only one Dorney family living there in 1910. They were William, his wife Lucy, and their four children; Florence Ada, William Vincent, John Francis and Eugene Frederick. Two other Dorney children, Lucy and ‘Bertie’, had not…
Otherwise known as… – Edna, part 2
My dad died in 1997. As the family gathered, his younger brother told me stories about their days growing up in the boy’s home at Kincumber. My uncle talked about times that their dad came to visit and how he took them out for fishing or surfing and how much he treasured those days. He…
The awakening – Edna, part 1
This is my paternal grandmother, Edna. The baby that she is clutching is my father, Jack. By the time Jack was 8 years old he was a resident at the St Joseph’s Home for Boys, an orphanage at Kincumber on the central coast of New South Wales. The unfortunate consequence of Jack being raised by…
KINdling 