My lovely husband, Jeffrey, has a vibrant sense of humor, and, after a bout of teasing and joking from him about who was more British, I naively thought I could shut him up by taking a DNA test. From that frivolous (and totally futile) effort, came a completely unexpected series of discoveries – and even more teasing and joking! I should probably start at the beginning…
This Spring, Jeffrey decided to order DNA tests for himself, our kids and his parents. I said I didn’t see any reason to be tested as I’d built a reasonably complete family tree on Ancestry (with a combination of census records, newspaper archives and some help from other relatives I found via their Ancestry family trees). The tree is public – search Ancestry for John David William Poulson and you should see it as Jo Ann’s Family Tree (you can’t search for me as I’m living and thus private, even in a public tree).
Jeffrey’s test came back and he started bragging about his large percentage of British heritage – as in, we could call him Lord Jeffrey. He didn’t want to hear about his lack of knowledge of correct forms of address – that he would be either Sir Jeffrey Snover, or Lord Snover of Burien (where he was born, and where no self-respecting Lord would go!). Frustrated by the fake English accent and teasing, I took advantage of an Ancestry DNA test sale, figuring I could shut Jeffrey up with some numbers of my own. Born and bred in Britain, I was certain I’d easily best my imposter husband.
Funny how things work out.
Ancestry said I was 21% British (versus Jeffrey’s 64%)! That isn’t what I expected, but it’s not as mad as it sounds – Jeffrey’s more recent ancestors are from the Netherlands and Poland, but further back in time (before 1700) there was a lot of British ancestry.
I’m entirely content being a mutt, but crowing about my more recent British ancestry wasn’t going to quiet the would-be Lord Jeffrey and I thought the DNA exercise had been a waste of effort.
Ancestry suggests DNA matches with other people who have been tested, and I scrolled through the list of possible matches, most of which were distant cousins connected to the large families of my Yorkshire forebears in the late 1800s. Comfortingly, Ancestry correctly identified a first cousin once removed I’d already been in touch with many times based on our family tree work.
Sally had posted a picture of her parents with Nanny, Sis & Ernie, and my aunt, Jill, who she thought was Aunty Betty (my other godmother). Sally is my age, but her Dad (Walter Richard Williams, known as Uncle Dick) was Nanny’s younger brother (he married a second time after his first wife died). I had the picture with two babies in an old album of Nanny’s – the older of the two babies is Sally – we each now had a family picture we hadn’t seen before.
There was one more close DNA match, closer than Sally – a Swedish woman in her 40s called Anna. The name meant nothing to me and she didn’t have a family tree for me to look at to try and find a connection. I contacted her via Ancestry and invited her to look through my family tree to see if she could spot how we were related.
Anna said she’d look but I didn’t hear more. I emailed Sally to ask if she also had a DNA match with Anna – that would help see if Anna was a Poulson relative (Gamps’ family) or Williams (Nanny’s). Sally, Jill and my Dad were first cousins. Look at Ancestry’s diagrams of various relationships if you’re not familiar with them.
Sally had a DNA match with Anna, and I asked her to give me the two numerical measures of closeness Ancestry uses, centimorgans and number of shared DNA segments. Ancestry’s explanation of centimorgans is that it’s a unit for measuring the length of a DNA segment; they show total length and number of matching segments and give you a predicted relationship. They can tell degrees of separation, but not an exact relationship – so four degrees could be first cousin (as Kate is) but also a great niece or a great-great-grandparent. If you are curious, you can look at a chart covering most of the possibilities.
Sally’s scores said she is less close to Anna than I am. This means that unless Gamps & Nanny had another child we didn’t know about (which was unlikely given the degree of closeness between me and Anna), it was either Jill or Dad who was the parent of Anna’s father, Lennart. Lennart was born 25 Jan 1952. My parents Yvonne & David were married by then, but were not working in the same repertory theatre the whole time, so I couldn’t rule out Lennart being Dad’s child.
I looked through the family tree to see if anyone else might be a candidate for the mystery parent – needed to be on the Williams side, alive in 1952 (!) and of a suitable age. Aunty Betty (Sis & Ernie’s daughter) was a maybe, but I ruled her out because there was no way for my scores to be higher than Sally’s if Betty (Sally’s cousin) was the mother – I’m Betty’s first cousin once removed.
To rule out Jill or David we needed a DNA test from Jill’s family, so I asked Jill’s daughter Kate if she’d be willing to let me buy her a DNA test for her birthday present. Kate was my maid of honor when Jeffrey and I were married and later that year, I was Kate’s matron of honor when she was married. Her son sat on my son’s head when he was an infant, and my son head locked her son when they were both toddlers – we managed not to get huffy about that, so I figured asking about a DNA test would be OK – and that she’d just say no if it wasn’t.
I didn’t think it was likely Jill was Lennart’s mother because (a) the birth was so close to Jill & Sven’s marriage and (b) Jill & Sven tried for several years to have children following their marriage in March 1952. They adopted their first child, Tim, in 1959 and only after that had Kate and Clive (biological children). My Dad having an affair with an actress he was working with was believable, and in some ways more likely, but that would have made Lennart my half brother and Anna my half niece. Our DNA numbers weren’t really high enough for that.
A real jumble of conflicting information.
Kate’s closeness (or not) to Anna would tell us a lot of what we wanted to know. I told Anna I’d ask Kate if she’d be willing to be tested, noting there’d be quite a a wait while the test was processed. There was also the question of who Lennart’s father was (assuming Jill was the mother). The test would tell us if it was Sven or someone else – Kate would be Lennart’s sister or half sister and that would have higher or lower centimorgan numbers in Kate’s relationship with Anna. If it wasn’t Sven, we’d be none the wiser without Anna getting lucky with another DNA match from Lennart’s other parent.
If Sven wasn’t the father, Jill, who went to Sweden as an au pair in 1951, would have had an insane year, finding the time to date/fall in love with Sven while also seeing someone else and being pregnant right around the same time. Not to mention looking after the two young girls she was au pair to in her spare time! If Sven was the father, the big unanswered question was why they didn’t raise the baby.
Kate was on holiday in Greece when I asked her if she’d be tested, and she said yes, but was initially skeptical that Jill could have had a baby in 1952 for the reasons I mentioned above. In addition to OK’ing a DNA test, she emailed her Aunt Joan (Sven’s brother’s widow) to ask if she knew anything about Jill having had a baby in 1952.
Joan was surprised that Kate was asking, but she did know something about Jill getting pregnant and was fairly sure it was Jill & Sven’s baby. The surprise was that she’d been thinking she should talk with Kate about this and had expected to meet up at a family wedding this summer. Kate & family had already made arrangements to go to Greece, so the in person meeting didn’t happen, but then Kate wrote asking about Jill’s baby. Via email, Joan relayed what she remembered Sven’s parents telling her.
Joan and Tex (Sven’s brother, Erik Rune was known as Tex) didn’t get married until 1963 – so she wasn’t around at the time Jill first went to Sweden – but had heard from Elna (Sven’s Mum) that Jill had been told by her father (Gamps) not to return to England pregnant and unmarried! The family story made the likelihood much greater that Jill was Lennart’s mother.
Kate and I talked a bit about Jill’s time in Sweden and whether the baby could have been Sven’s. We both were hit by how heartbreaking it would have been, if it was theirs, to have to place the baby for adoption because Gamps wasn’t willing to accept a baby born before they were married. Both of us were deeply sad at the thought of how Jill would probably have felt.
Jill & Sven had a quiet registry office wedding in Salisbury just two months after Lennart was born. No family there except Gamps & Nanny. Bizarrely, Sven’s 1952 album has a photos of a family walk the morning of the wedding with my parents in the pictures, but even they aren’t in the wedding pictures outside the registry office. Someone (Nanny?) put a small announcement about a “quiet” wedding in the local newspaper. Following a honeymoon at the Evergreens Hotel in the New Forest (Lyndhurst) the new Mr & Mrs Lindgren headed back to Sweden. Kate believes Jill got a job at the British Embassy in Sweden. By October 1955 they returned to London (we don’t know exactly when, but Jill was on the electoral roll living with my parents in Gloucester Crescent by then).
Kate and I also wondered why they didn’t stay in Sweden longer, get married there and go back to England later, once a few months here or there in a baby’s age wouldn’t really be noticeable? Jill & Sven were both old enough not to need parental consent to marry. After they were married in England and returned to Sweden, was there some reason they couldn’t raise the baby? Money issues? Or did they think it was best for Lennart to have him raised by a established married couple? I’ve looked to see if there were any relatives of Sven’s linked to the couple who raised Lennart, but I haven’t found a connection. So many questions, with none of the principals are still alive to ask.
What’s additionally puzzling is a photo album Kate has from 1952 full of photos Sven took. When they were back in Sweden after getting married, there are a few pictures of Jill holding a baby about 5 months old and the only written notation on the page was (in Sven’s writing) TRAINING. It’s hard not to speculate that the baby in the picture is Lennart. As to who was training whom or for what, that’s an unanswered question.
Arguments about a pre-marriage pregnancy would certainly explain a strained relationship between Jill and Gamps (although they did later reconcile). On the other hand Nanny and Gamps visited Jill & Sven in Sweden after they were married – the picture here shows them smiling and spending time at a teahouse, suggesting they were on speaking terms, at least some of the time.
Sven and his brother Tex also had a distant relationship for a long time, and apparently differing views of what should have happened in 1952 were a part of that. Possibly Lennart has his own set of long-unanswered questions about why his birth parents couldn’t raise him. It’s not clear if anyone in any of the families was happy about how this situation played out. It’s worth remembering that this was the era of closed adoptions, where everyone thought it was best for the child to keep secrets (an era that’s thankfully gone, if I may editorialize a tad).
Kate’s DNA test results came back last week and Lennart is Kate’s brother – Kate is Anna’s aunt. We have another cousin we didn’t know about, although for the moment, Lennart isn’t excited about knowing more of his story. Anna is the one curious to know more about her origins and is very excited, as Kate and I are. As Anna so succinctly put it “Whatever my dad thinks or not, this is his story”. Anna thinks the baby with Jill in the photo looks just like her and her Dad’s baby pictures.
Kate would love to meet Anna, her children (she has three) and her Dad, assuming he warms to the idea over time. It would be marvelous if somehow we know more about how this adoption came to be, but that may depend on whether this was a formal legal adoption or something more ad hoc, and how Lennart feels after he has had time to adjust.
Safe to say, this is not at all the outcome I expected when I sent for a DNA test! The icing on the cake is that in looking at our DNA results and Ethnicities, even my half-Swedish cousin Kate is more British than I am!! Lord Jeffrey is delighted…