Who Do You Think You Are - Ruth Madeley 9th Jul

[kiterunner]

Originally Posted by Ann from Sussex

Really good episode. Is this the first WDYTYA where they have relied on DNA to trace a family?

I think they have done DNA testing before but I can't remember which episode nor the details of what they did with it.

[Olde Crone]

I have a friend who discovered in adulthood that his mother was in fact his aunt, and the aunt he saw once a year was his birth mother. It didn't end well, his birth family rejected him by solicitor's letter, so I do understand the secrecy, to some extent.

OC

[Ann from Sussex]

I don't think younger people now who may never have known anyone of my parents or in-laws generation, can appreciate how shameful illegitimacy was to both mother and child, not to mention their wider family. My mother adored her father who died before I was born and told me many stories about him. What she never mentioned was that he had fathered a child and had a court order to pay maintenance to the mother. This family lived next door to where Mum grew up but she never gave us an inkling that she had a slightly older half sister. The same applied in my mother in law's family. The woman she always referred to as her aunt was, in fact, her grandmother, the mother, not the sister of her father. None of them would have dreamt that their secrets would be revealed to descendants over 100 years later by technology they couldn't imagine possible. I am actually glad that they never knew because they would have been mortified.

[ElizabethHerts]

My husband's grandmother was illegitimate and was brought up by a different family.

When my husband's mother was a child she was taken to visit family. There was a married couple and an elderly relative. The wife of the married couple was indeed a relative but what my mother-in-law didn't realise at the time was that the elderly relative, a spinster, was her grandmother. Her mother told her at a later date.