Western Morning News (Saturday)
Some things are probably better left alone
BE careful what you ask for. I learned this recently when the results of a DNA test I submitted for one of those ancestry websites came back, and with it some surprises.
I’m always getting emails saying that relatives have been found – fourth removed on my mother’s uncle’s brother’s side and now living in Saskatchewan. The nearest match I had was from a chap living in Slough. His profile picture showed him ‘wearing’ a whole pan full of boiled spaghetti, and I decided I could do without him in my life.
A couple of Sundays ago I got another message telling me of relatives that had been found. I almost deleted it, but instead clicked on it, and therein unravelled a family mystery.
My mother, one of six, always told of her big sister, who I’ll call Jane. Jane got a job as a secretary in a lawyer’s office and felt she had arrived, especially when she dated the boss. She felt she had moved away from her own family and told them so. They were told of her wedding, but not invited.
Naturally, the family were distressed. Come the day of the wedding, my grandmother, mother, the youngest of the family, and my grandfather dressed up and stood by the church on the pavement. When the bride appeared, she looked straight through her family and left. The whole event broke my grandmother, but come Christmas, just three months after the wedding, the family hoped the black sheep would return. They even laid a place at the table. But she didn’t show. On Christmas night, the family went for a drink in the pub. My grandmother felt unwell. She died in the ladies loo in my mum’s arms, suffering a massive heart attack. My mother, aged 12, went to her sister’s office to tell her, but the sister denied knowing her.
From then on, Jane was persona non grata. No one knew or cared what had happened to her and they blamed the sister for Grandma’s death. Jane simply disappeared, though we knew she was in the area. Little did I know but I had cousins and an aunt and uncle right near my school.
When I was older, I tried to track Jane down, to no avail. Until, that is, I got an email from someone I’ll call Lesley, who posted on the ancestry site. She said we shared close DNA, and she was the granddaughter of someone called Jane, whose grandfather was a lawyer in the town where I was at school.
I immediately wrote back, sent heaps of photos of uncles, aunties, grandparents and more. When I got her response I was shocked. It seems
Jane had never mentioned having relatives. She’d changed her surname, which is why we couldn’t trace her. And Lesley had gone on the site to find details of her grandfather’s family, not expecting to find a whole new family on the maternal side.
The hand grenade exploded for Lesley’s family and they had to reevaluate the grandmother they thought they knew and loved, for someone who had been an inveterate liar. Jane told of the father who died when she was born being a stocking salesman of Polish extraction. My grandfather set up the fire service in Cairo, had sailed the last clippers round the world – he was an old man when he married my grandmother, and my mother, as I say, was the youngest, so his past went back a long way.
Anyone less likely to sell stockings is hard to imagine. The Polish bit? Heaven only knows. No Polish genes have shown up in our ancestry and we don’t know where or why that should have been invented.
I saw pictures of my Aunt Jane for the first time in my life. She looked very much like my mother and the resemblance gave me quite a jolt. My mother adored her big sister as a kid, and the shock of losing her in such traumatic circumstances, quickly followed by the death of her mother at just 52, must have been a great deal to take in. No wonder none of the family felt drawn to trace their errant sibling.
My aunt died 12 years ago. Strangely she’d lived in Cornwall for a bit. And strangely she and her children have all called their children the same names that my other cousins have – and they wouldn’t have known about it. Jane had two children. One was born the same year as me, just two days older. My other cousin lives in the Canaries. I’ve yet to hear from her.
After I’d sent the pictures, Lesley asked if I knew the story behind the split. I wrote back saying I did, but felt perhaps that bygones should be bygones, just remember the person they knew. But she insisted on knowing, so I told her. And since then I’ve heard nothing.
Can you break a family up from beyond the grave? Perhaps. Should the genie be left in the bottle? Probably. Like the relative with spaghetti on his head, some things are better left alone.
The hand grenade exploded for Lesley’s family and they had to re-evaluate the grandmother they thought they knew