Case Study
How an Ancestry DNA test helped one family historian discover the GI father he never knew
An autosomal DNA test provided the breakthrough that retired BBC journalist
David Hulme, from
Stockport, Greater
Manchester, had dreamed of. For
25 years he had tried to identify the
American soldier who had used a false name during his affair with David’s mother in the Second World War. David thought that he would go to his grave without ever knowing the truth.
However, in 2015 he contacted the UK organisation GI Trace ( gitrace.org), set up to help people like David find their American GI fathers. “The genealogists at GI Trace advised me to take an autosomal test,” said David. The results of the test that David took with Ancestry showed that a second cousin in the USA had also been tested. Through her, David identified his father: Allan Russell Edwards, from Detroit, Michigan.
Unfortunately a fire in 1973 at the National Personnel Records Center in St Louis, Missouri, destroyed most of the USA’s military records – between 16 million and 18 million in all. But staff at the Center spent the years following the fire rebuilding up its archives from any sources they could find.
The documents that GI Trace located at the NPRC confirmed that Allan had served with the 837th Ordnance Depot Company, which was in Stockport between May and June 1944: the period when David’s mother became pregnant with him.
“My father died in 1964, so we were never destined to meet,” David explains. “But I am now in touch with a half-sister in northern Michigan, and we hope to meet one day. I also have a half-brother in Detroit, although he prefers not to communicate. I can understand that. Discovering my father and his family has been life-changing.”
David also learned that, through his paternal great grandmother, he and all of the Edwards family in Michigan are the descendants of two Mayflower passengers: Stephen Hopkins and Thomas Rogers.