Molly Tidbury
Debbie explains how DNA testing helped her to smash her long-standing brick wall
After almost 20 years of research I’d been able to identify nearly all of the descendants of my eight great grandparents, but one branch of the family tree had always eluded me. My great grandmother, Mary Hannah ‘Molly’ Saunders, was born in Brockenhurst, Hampshire, in 1882, the daughter of William Saunders and Hannah Ball. She had one sibling, a brother William who was born in 1884. By 1891 the family had moved to London. I was unable to find any trace of William junior after 1901 because of the difficulties of researching such a common surname in London.
One day a new match popped up at AncestryDNA who was predicted to be my mum’s second to third cousin. However, I didn’t recognise the name, and there was no family tree. I checked the Shared Matches and noticed that the match was shared with a third cousin with whom we’d already been able to make a connection. Our common ancestors were Moses Ball and Mary Butler, Hannah Ball’s parents. This meant that the match had to be somewhere on this line. William Saunders junior seemed like the logical connection.
I wrote to the match and asked if she had come across the names Saunders, Ball or Butler. She responded almost immediately to say that her mother was a Saunders. It turned out that she’d been given the test as a present, and wasn’t particularly interested in family history. But the information she gave me about her family was sufficient for me to verify that my hypothesis was correct, and to trace all of William’s descendants. At last my brick wall was solved – thanks to a DNA test.