This is a true story of hope and determination - Rita and Lesley's Story

This is a true story of hope and determination – hope that even if you only have distant DNA matches, biological fathers and grandfathers can be found! Determination - keep trying and don't give up, even if it takes 2 years!.

This is Lesley and Rita’s story. They lived thousands of miles apart and yet were close cousins. This case was solved by their determination, tree building and communication skills, by the kind people who tested for them and my analytical and statistical skills and ability to spot patterns.

Here are Rita and Lesley when they were about 5:

Rita thought that her father was her biological father so when she matched with Lesley on Ancestry DNA as a close cousin she was really shocked.

Lesley thought that she knew her father’s biological line too. They both had solid trees and so they couldn’t work out why it was that they both had very different family trees. Surely one was wrong…it turned out that, unbeknown to them, both paternal lines were off.

Their closest shared DNA matches were distant – 4th to 6th cousins so to solve this we would need to go right back to their matches’ 3rd, 4th or 5th set of great grandparents, work out which of these they shared and work down to the next generation and find a child which was their ancestor and so on. Not easy when couples back then were having 13 or so children but only one was the right one. We also were hampered by the inaccuracies of trees and records and other cousins who also had skeletons in their ancestral cupboards. We were going back to the 18th century and records were scarce. Solving distant cases are hard when there is just one unknown but, in this case, there were two unknowns. Solving a puzzle with distant matches with two missing pieces is much harder.

This is their story:

“It has been a long and frustrating two years waiting for good matches to appear to solve our riddle of how and where Rita and I matched.

Rita took an FTDNA test and uploaded this to Gedmatch. I took an Ancestry DNA test. I uploaded my results to the other usual sites, which included Gedmatch. Rita spotted me and I suggested that she also tested with Ancestry.

We had no names in common at all. We determined between us that it was both our paternal side where the match came from. Rita matched with my nephew, great nieces and nephew and eventually my elder sister took the test for me, she too matched Rita.

but my paternal cousins did not. My family only matched my paternal cousins through my grandmother not the grandfather. This is one of the reasons Rita and I found it so hard to find our connection, my father was brought up by a non bio father but we didn't know.

At this point I asked advice and a lovely lady, Yvonne Lynn, sent me a message... We live up the road from each other.. This was meant to be.

Rita had her sister test, here again we found another reason our search was so hard... The test came back as half siblings.

We shared information and photos from our lives... Well one could see a definite familiar family features!

Yvonne worked so hard with us spending many hours working trees.. Leads we found often went nowhere and our matches together were not high matches, until towards the end of last year we had 2 matches come through.... but one of the matches didn’t know her family. The other was a 3rd/4th cousin match. Yvonne identified who should test and kind people within a certain family tested both for myself and for Rita, to see which line in their tree we would descend from.

Rita's connection came through first and placed her as half sibling to the family. It was a family that she knew from her childhood. Mine came through later finding that our grandfather's were brothers, so we are first cousins once removed... Both welcomed into the family. There are lots of questions still to answer but the main one of where in our biological family we belong is now answered.

We both owe a lot to Yvonne for her dedication to our story... We have loved working with you in this quest. Thankyou so so much, without you we would still be looking!