Census Sensibility

Some months ago I posted about the mystery in my family of my grandfather who discovered he was adopted when he was in his 60s. As a genealogist, I had been researching his birth family to no avail for a number of years. I finally had a breakthrough last year when I found evidence of his (alleged) birth father's subsequent marriage, children and so on. After being in touch with my (alleged) great-grandfather's descendant, Paul, for some time, he finally did an Ancestry DNA test and we've been waiting for the results to come through. It's been quite a nervous wait - what if I was wrong? I was in a business meeting the other day and got onto the topic of DNA testing and genealogy with the client. I decided to show them my research and also my DNA test results (I am always  happy to talk about genealogy, especially if there's a chance I can give someone else the bug). Logging into Ancestry DNA I saw there was a new match and that this match was listed as being a p...

(This post is a follow-on from this one) The prospect of phoning someone you are potentially related to and announcing that their grandfather had an illegitimate child is, to say the least, rather daunting. I sat in my living room, phone in hand, papers strewn around me, rehearsing what I would say. "Hi, so uhmmm, I think we're related". No, no. That's too blunt and too vague. "What do you know about your grandfather's activities before he married your grandmother?" Ugh, too clinical and cold. "So did you know your grandfather went and got some girl knocked up?" Ugh, no, no no no no no. "I'm really not trying to ruffle feathers, but the evidence I have strongly points to your grandfather having been with a woman called Catherine Robertson before his marriage and, as a result, being the birth father of my  grandfather". Yes, that's as good as it gets. Geoffrey Hartley Crawford (R) with his (adoptive) parents Henry and ...

I have a big family. If I count my parents, step-parents, half-brother and sister, my step-brothers and sister, their partners ( and  their children) plus my grandparents then we're up to twenty-two people. Add cousins, uncles, second cousins and the like (and their children, partners, etc), and we're inching close to one hundred people. Most of my large extended family is on my father's side as my mother is an only child. Born in 1953 to Geoff and Anita Crawford, she didn't encounter a large family until she married my father. I've not asked her how she dealt with that, but knowing my mum, she took it in her stride, rolling her eyes at all the quirks that come with large families. Her parents also came from small families. My grandmother, Anita, was also an only child and my grandfather, Geoff, had one sister. She has cousins, who I never knew as they lived in Queensland as we in Victoria, but all in all - small family was the way of the Crawfords. In the 1...