Unexpected ancestry

Question

Did you ever come across some very unexpected ancestry? I did. When I saw the first photograph of my paternal great grandmother, Lily Annie Cox (nee Walker), b Lincolnshire UK 1876, I was surprised....shocked....to see she wasn't fully British. Ahem....half African possibly. Who her father was we shall never know, but I love it!!!!!!

Comments

Nice. Good looking woman. Um: How her mother became pregnant with her, we do not know.... One could explain!!! :) :)

 

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DNA is in. The father was MELANESIAN. Hahaha. Even more confusing.

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Not certain that you can really ascribe 1% Melanesian to any particular ancestor at any particular time . It would be a good question to ask of the 'experts'.

However, there were far more black people in Britain during the 19th century than many people realise. Unsurprisingly ports had  larger  populations , many were transient, some stayed.

Annie was born in Burton on Stather which is on the Humber  There was a landing  stage here for a steamer which linked Gainsborough and Hull. (apparently the word Stather may mean Landing stage in Danish )

You might find this interesting https://www.africansinyorkshireproject.com/hull-sailors.html

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I  know it is a small amount, but no sub-saharan african turned up, just the surprise Melanesian. I  know most of my lines for between 500-1000 years and they are just as the DNA read: English/Irish/Scots/Welsh, Scandinavian, Iberian, North Africa and Native American. The  only wild cards were Central European Jewish (which Annie clearly could not be) and Melanesian. When you look at her features, it fits. All her father gave us was a small bit of DNA to add to the rest of the mix. Had any Indian turned up, I would not have been surprised, because there is a strong belief in one line that one of our British East India Company soldiers married a local woman in 1826, but, if it is there, her DNA must be a very small player, smaller than that of the Melanesian, which would make sense as it was two generations earlier on that other line.

Answer 1

I am just getting started, but we shall see.

Answer 2

I was surprised to find that the wives going back on my male line did not come from north east Leicestershire, which I always assumed they did, but came from Wimbourne, Bath and Liverpool. Not quite as far as Africa though! The men I thought were all bricklayers/builders/roofers like my dad, uncles and grandad turn out to have worked in lime quarrying and agriculture. Made me wonder how they found their wives, then I thought about it and decided that there was a lot of industrial development in the English midlands so probably the families of those women travelled to the midlands for work prospects and they met here, rather than travelling themselves. On my mother's side, the men were all ag labs (with the odd stonemason) and my great grandad (a gardener) and his wife came from the Banbury area, probably via the railway when work was not as plentiful or lucrative back in Banbury as it was here in developing Leicestershire.