General Chat

I think you need to wait until you get your sister's BC David. If the father is the same as yours then it's a pretty fair bet that this person is collectively your father. If its not, then I think you'll either have to accept what's on your B.C, or resign yourself to the fact that if you are the result of another relationship a and the chances of finding that person are very slim. Again, without DNA you can never be completely certain either way, but the same name appearing more than once would suggest that this man was your collective parent.

No I think what rambling was saying. She would reply but she has run out of her subscription.. was less than 99% likely to be my father looking at choe records under robert robinson, the person in tree searches which wasn't mentioned here has coincidences but not exactly sure on oliver isaacs 1951 lambeth. And that I cannot see any birth records of possible for 1940 or 51 whether alias or real. Still brings me to falsified cert but right name and birth naturalisation for me and my mum. Getting death cert of nan and hopefully shed light on some family and maybe if my father has pushed my family to split from any of my mums kids

Yeah I've even resulted to contacting jk salvation army and findermonkey. Salvation have started a search for more recent events I don't know about which could result in a death I'm suspicious of with sisters. Finder wanted 400+ per person so not gone there. And jk have not heard for 3 months in searching too. I know busy and popular show... least might give me dna if sisters are full father... which would lead me as a full or half brother... but all waiting on that...

Well, I'm not quite sure that without DNA you can ever be certain, but good luck in your search David, and I hope, at the end of the day, you get some sort of closure.

David, I think what Rambling Rose and I are both saying is that the Chee connection is a great big red herring. It's 99.999% UNlikely that there is any connection with you.

1940 to 1960 there were 539 Robert Robinsons born in England/Wales ...

I'm not clear on whether you are still pursuing that, your Researching line suggests you are.

We could be all wet. He could have been born Robinson, 20-something years older than your mother, and been a 44-yr-old nurse when you were born, who had assumed the name Isaacs ...


as far as the Liverpool birth, I think we can be pretty sure that Irene was born in 1906 in Liverpool and her father was Ah Chee (or Chee Ah) who married in 1902. Have you noticed anything Asian about your features, David? :-D

you would be 1/8, you know ...

Irene's parents' marriage was the first Chee event in England ... the ones shown before that are mistranscriptions. Her father was Chinese. She was one half Chinese, her son was one quarter Chinese. This doesn't sound like your family I assume?

Ok thankyou magpie.

Jooniecloonie not everyone has distinguished features of parentage especially if the features died down along the ancestry line and some take on more British features. It's like my friends kids are all Caucasian but their father is Jamaican... out of 5 kids 1 was mixed. 4 were Caucasian and out of them 1 child has afro hair..

So in a sense if my father was Indian in a sense going among the linked person I might not have all or every feature... as I have a strong Caucasian line...going through mothers side.

Or at least my way of thinking. As for the choe/chee herring line I have already bought ceRT and cannot cancel. Just hoping that the cert isn't found hope they go with isaacs or something...

Well David, on the interracial thing, I've been wanting to ask whether maybe your father was Black/interracial Caribbean ...!

Isaacs is a somewhat common name in Jamaica, and many Caribbean immigrants to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s worked in health care.

But seriously, if none of you and your sisters shows any hint of Asian heritage, Chee (it is Chee not Choe!) is leading you nowhere. But in case you're still curious, someone at this site does have Ah Chee born 1884 in their tree, and I think that will be Irene's father. That person and one other also have Irene in their tree. The other person claims (I am not making this up!) to be the Duke of Aquitaine. Too bad you aren't related! :-D

Pmpl. Yeah I really don't think I'm heir several times removed never ever have. As for where surname is from always told I have Jewish background but never practicing but then I'm told fathers are not mine so in a sense a herring amongst the pigeons is always something to fish around for but still in a deep puddle without water.

Heh David. :-)

So listen, if you're serious about this and it seems you are, you should think about DNA testing.


Since you are a male person and it is your immediate male ancestor, your father, that you want to find out about, you are in the very best position to use DNA. The male-line DNA -- YDNA -- is passed from father to son and it is the most accurate and useful test for finding family connections, because of the frequency with which it mutates. Most likely, you and your father would have identical YDNA, unless a minor mutation occurred with yourself. And so on back.

So you might be able to find an uncle, a cousin, a great-grandson of your great-great-grandfather ... if someone who has tested shares a male-line relation with you within a few generations, the test would say. And then you would work with that info to figure out who in that family might be your father's line.

I have had male family members on both of my parents' sides do a YDNA test. As a result, I have found a piece of a puzzle on my mum's side -- the surname you see in my Researching line is apparently her father's male-line surname, in spite of the fake name used by his father, and the real surname he was born with, the surname his YDNA matches with is a third altogether. A new mystery ...

On my father's side, I don't expect much in the way of matches and have never got any that take me back at all. My father's greatx3 grandfather (born about 1735) seems to have been the only male in the village with his surname 'X' in his generation, and he had only one son, who had only one son. That son (my greatx2 grandfather) had several sons, one of whom was my great-grandfather. When I had a male relation in my generation do DNA testing, we got a 100% match -- with a great-grandson of the brother of my great-grandfather, who lives in the US and I had already met through 'traditional' family history research. So the two great-great-grandsons of Mr X born about 1820 have identical YDNA. At least it proves they are both legitimately descended from that point down! :-)


The trick is, of course, that you only get matches if people who match have tested. So you might not get one today, or next year, but maybe in 5 or 10 years when more people have tested ...

Most people testing at present are in the US, because they're the ones looking for their British/European ancestors. Both of my matches live there, because their families had emigrated in the 1800s or 1900s. In the case of my mystery name Hoar, the family emigrated from 10 miles away from where my great-grandfather was born in Cornwall.

Another thing you could consider, to start with, is a test to see whether you and one of your sisters are really siblings. That wouldn't be useful to find your father really, but then you would know more about the 'family' side of things. And - the same test ('autosomal' or 'familyfinder') could also find cousins on your father's side, including on your father's mother's side. This can help quite a lot too.

I can recommend the company Family Tree DNA (FTDNA) for this. I use them. They have the biggest database of users who are interested in finding matches, and they offer the best support. You can join all kinds of projects once you have tested, and the project administrators, who are other users with special interests and expertise, are more than happy to help with answers and advice. For free. You don't have to subscribe to the site or anything.

Haha. I just checked the email account I use for the DNA stuff (I keep all my personal info completely private at the FTDNA site) and I have messages about each of my men saying they each have 2 new YDNA matches ... at the YDNA25 level, which is useless but I'll check them out. (At only 25, you might share an ancestor 40 generations back, or you might not). You need to start at YDNA37 at least. All of this is gibberish if you've never looked into it, but it starts to make sense once you do the test and start getting explanations.

You could do what I did ... do the Y37 first and then, if someone seems like a match, do the Y67 with them to be more accurate. My match at Y37 held up strong at Y67.

Could be cheaper than a bunch of certificates that go nowhere, in the long run!


The 'familyfinder' test is on sale right now for $69 US (from $99)
And the Y37 test is on sale for $228 US (from $268)

Oh no wait, that is $228 for the Y37 PLUS the family finder. That's £175 and it's a good sale and I recommend that for your purposes.

This is the sale site https://www.familytreedna.com/sale.aspx
but it doesn't say how long the sale is on ... the next sale will be at Christmas.


If you're interested I can help you work it out if you like.

Ok thankyou so much. Yeah wouldn't know where to start so I will do a y37 but I'm uk based so it's not a problem I assume....

Would the y67 be a better onequipped or would I just need to start at 37? Yeah I have no idea lol

Feel free to inbox jooniecloonie details or even a plain version to understand properly lol

I would say start with Y37 + Family Finder (the $228 bundle (£175)).

Once you have done a 37, there is an option for upgrading to 67.

It's a little more expensive than starting with Y67, but if the Y37 doesn't find any matches, the Y67 would not find any either.

The accuracy of a match increases with the number of markers tested, so the chance of finding a match at a higher level actually *decreases*. If you are close at Y37, you will almost certainly be less close at Y67, because more mismatched markers will appear; you won't be more close.

I have loads of matches at Y25, but when those people have actually tested at Y37 or Y67 (as I have), the match disappears -- there are too many mismatches in the markers from 25 to 37 or 67. That is, we match somewhat when only the first 25 markers are considered, but that turns out to be random noise when you look more closely (at more markers). The match the 25-marker results show is either just chance, or indication of a common ancestor hundreds of years or more ago.

If you got matches at Y37, and they seemed close, and the other person had tested to Y67 (or Y111), or would agree to do so, then you could upgrade.

(Anybody who knows this stuff will be saying: but you are leaving out haplogroups!! That's okay. You don't need to know about haplogroups now. :-D )

The site sends you emails to tell you about any matches it makes, which it does automatically. Usually the match will tell you the surname of the person who matches. (I keep my test people's surnames private, but disclose them privately if there is a real match.) And then you have the option of emailing them directly.

If you seem to match with a particular surname, you can join the project for that surname, if there is one. (There are gazillions of surname projects.)

You can then also join the "haplogroup" project you fit into.

In both cases, your list of marker numbers will appear in a chart showing all the members' results, that is sorted to show who your closest matches are. This is only useful if people who match have actually joined projects, of course.

I can give you advice about protecting privacy at the site, which does a bad job of that itself. Start with opening a gmail account for the purpose, that doesn't give your name -- it could be surname.search or david.who @gmail or anything you like! But in your case, you probably want people to know your details, so you may not be as concerned.

I would start by ordering the test while the sale is on and sending in your sample (only one sample is needed for multiple tests). Then we can exchange email addresses privately and I can help you get started, if you like.

Remember -- the match I got for my mystery ancestor was the most insane bit of good luck that ever happened. My reasoning had been:
- my ancestor's 'real' surname (the one on his birth record, not the one he passed down to the family) was very common in Cornwall
- people from Cornwall were the great emigrators, particularly to North America and Australia in connection with mining
- people in the US especially are searching for their British origin
- so - there is a good chance I will find a match with someone with that surname whose ancestor emigrated from Cornwall to NA or AUS in the mid-1800s (the great exodus from Cornwall) to work in mining

and I found the match exactly as I had predicted: with someone whose ancestor emigrated from Cornwall in the 1850s to the US in connection with mining ... but whose surname was completely different.

That one person in the US had had her father tested because she wanted to address the rumours that her father was not a Hoar, and was instead the son of the doctor who had treated his father in the US for tuberculosis (the scourge of mining communities everywhere). The truth of all her years of family tree research depended on the answer!

I could not confirm the surname, with my person's test results, since it was completely new to me. But they certainly confirmed the Cornwall origin, so the rumour was almost certainly false, since it was very unlikely the doctor came from that region of Cornwall too. (Then she tested her father's brother's son, and he matched too, and that settled it for her father.)

Meanwhile ... my person got not one single match of any kind in the surname project for his official surname, which has nearly 1,000 members.

So somewhere along the line, one of his male ancestors - his 'real' father, his great-grandfather, his greatx8 grandfather, or an ancestor from before there were surnames - was also the ancestor of the Mr Hoar in the US. I have pretty much no way of finding where! but it was almost certainly since about 1500.

And as for the family finder test, it tests for cousinhood -- it might find you matches with a female relation of your father's family, or a relation of your father's mother's family, and matches like that can help for sure. I am not an expert on that test, but there are members at FTDNA who can help a lot with that.

That's a lot of blah blah but I think it helps to explain the process. If you get a match with someone whose family comes from the right vicinity, for instance, as mine did, it's worth looking into.

Oh yes, UK-based, no problem at all, the price is the same everywhere (unlike Ancestry for instance). It is just converted from dollars when it's taken from your credit card. :-)

Speaking of Ancestry - never ever use it for DNA testing. It does not do YDNA anymore, and the autosomal ('family finder') tests it does just give meaningless so-called ethnicity results, and the database is too small for it to be likely you will have any matches, and there is no support for interpreting results ... etc.

I have bought the y37 so hopefully may give some more information. Always thought thy couldn't tell me anything apart from what countries are more likely to hold ancestors or whatever. Still not sure how that's gonna help but willing to try anything

Nope David, that's exactly the thing.

Those stupid Ancestry tests pretend to tell you what countries your ancestors are from. (There is a whole explanation of why those tests do not even do that - don't worry about it, just don't pay for it. :-) )

YDNA specifically traces the *male line* -- YDNA goes from father to son to son to son to son all down the line. It only changes, very slightly, about every 4 generations on average.

That's why my male rellie and the other person who tested YDNA - they are both great-great-grandsons of the same man - had a 100% match at 37 markers (the other person only tested to 37).

The two men have the same great-great-grandfather; their great-grandfathers were brothers, and their grandfathers were first cousins.

The great-great-grandfather's YDNA had been passed down essentially intact.

His two sons (the two men's great-grandfathers) got the same YDNA,
and they each passed it to a son (the two men's grandfathers),
who each passed it to a son (the two men's fathers),
who each passed it to a son (the two men who did the DNA test)

This is why your question -- who your father is -- is the one for which a good answer can be found by testing YDNA
.... if - IF - someone who shares a male ancestor also tests.

There are undoubtedly people who share male ancestors with you -- say:
- your father's father's brother's son's son
- your great-great-grandfather's brother's son's son's son ...

IF, of course, your father's father had brothers, or your father's great-grandfather had brothers who have son's son's sons ... etc.

This is why I don't expect to get any matches from earlier than that great-great-grandfather born c1820 -- his father born c1795 had no brothers, and his grandfather born c1835 (old father) had no brothers, or even male cousins in that line, etc. So I think our families - descended from the sons of the man born c1820 - are the only ones left from that male surname line in that village.

YDNA can give very precise, very reliable information about male-line ancestry, IF there is someone to match to.

AND note -- surname has nothing to do with YDNA matching -- the match will reflect the YDNA similarity, no matter what the surname. Your surname has no bearing on who you might be matched with. And that's why it is useful -- it can find matches you would never have known of.

There are two ways of finding matches.

- Test, e.g. with FTDNA, and hope that someone who shares ancestors has tested.

- Using information you have, find someone you think may be related in a direct male line from male ancestors and ask them to do a test.

For example, you could ask a man named Isaacs who was born in Liverpool to do a test, and that way you would see whether you match with that particular Isaacs family from Liverpool.

There are people at this website named Isaacs who have male Isaacs-s in their tree who were born in Liverpool, for instance. Of course, this would be a delicate undertaking!

It's a whoooole lot easier to understand this stuff once you have actually done the test, believe me!

One other thing - if you want to use the DNA testing to see whether you and your sister have the same father, your sister needs to do a Family Finder test too (the one that is on sale as a stand-alone test).

Did you buy the Y37 PLUS Family Finder?

If you can, you really do want to do that.

If you didn't, and you want to, you can just email the company and ask them to help you change your order. They are very helpful about that.

I've applied for y37

okay ... I recommend Y37 + FamilyFinder

so you can potentially be matched with a wide range of other relations, for example:
your father's sister's child
your father's mother's brother's daughter's son
your father's mother's father's grandchild ...
(up to 5th cousin distance)
(not just men directly descended from your father's direct male ancestors)

and so you can use it to test your relationship with your sisters

cheaper to order as a bundle during the sale than separately later

As usual only thing I managed to find was the kit y37 no family finder attached they want extra payment for that... not sure... I've contacted support saying about the sale and if they can amend the order not just test kit

i have contacted a search tree person.. everything is very odd.. they moved from crawley to texas.. however i have managed to get replies from her husband via fb apparently its a glitch or never heard of the genes etc... very odd and suspicious... or he hasnt spoken to her. unknown behind a screen. apparently i didnt email either but showed the proof. yet this bhavna still hasnt spoken to me.... this patel is really doing my head in lol