I decided that it was high time that I looked at some of my closer DNA matches, where I am unable to identify a common ancestor. I should explain that ‘closer’ in my case means not very close at all. My lack of cousins means that I only have three matches above 70cM and one of those is my daughter. My attention turned to a 48cM match with no tree. From shared matches, I had placed this person on the Smith/Seear side of my family tree. The Smith/Seears are tricky DNA wise because three generations of Smiths marry Seears, so I am often related to people on this line more than once. This means that suggested relationships are distorted. Without my pedigree collapse, the amount of shared cM with the mystery match might suggest that the relationship was in the region of a 3^rd or 4^th cousin, maybe with a removed or two.

The profile indicated that the user had joined Ancestry in 2016 and hadn’t signed in for over a year. I don’t want to give the actual name for privacy reasons but the user name looked like it could be the first half of an unusual female christian name and a surname run into one. This isn’t it but think constabolt might be Constance Bolt. I guessed at the name, Googled it and up came an obituary for the husband of someone with that name. This indicated that the person I was searching for was born in a particular smallish town in the south of England. Further internet searches revealed a maiden name and a middle christian name. To make this story easier to follow, yet still anonymise it, I am going to tell it with a fictitious maiden name. Let us say it was ‘Forester’, which probably has a similar rarity value as the actual name. This with the other information was unusual enough for me to locate a birth entry and discover that the lady, if she was still alive, would be in her nineties. Better still, her mother’s maiden name was Seear. Not only did it look as if I was on the right track but a great advantage over Smith. Yay! Eureka and all that. Now all I had to do was find a marriage for a Seear and a ‘Forester’ and I was away. This was going to be easy. Err, no. Not a marriage in sight. I searched for any other ‘Forester’- Seear children. None. Given that the marriage was likely to be not long after the first world war, it seemed probable that Miss Seear had married x before she was married to Mr ‘Forester’.

The Seears’ normal stomping ground is east London. There couldn’t be many in this small southern English town could there? There weren’t. I tried the 1911 census and the 1939 register for that area. I found a family in 1911 with two daughters who were potential wives for Mr ‘Forester’. They both married other people and died with those surnames; no second marriages to Mr ‘Forester’. The 1911 census indicated that there were other children who were not in the household, maybe I could find another daughter. According to the census there had been nine children, three had died and three more needed to be found. The family was headed by a married Emily Seear, no husband in sight. I found her in 1901, still in London, still married and still no husband, this gave me three more children. The children had unusual christian names but I couldn’t identify birth registrations for them all. Checking the births I could find on the GRO site gave me Emily’s maiden name but searching with Seear and the maiden name did not reveal the missing children, nor were they registered under Emily’s maiden name. I had her year of marriage from the 1911 census. This meant that I could find her marriage entry and the name of Mr Seear, who was potentially the grandfather of my DNA match. It was a name I recognised and suggested that the match and I were third cousins once removed twice over. I will continue to refer to him as Mr Seear, although, from this point, I was searching under his full name.

I was left with a gap and some questions. Which daughter of Emily Seear was the mother of my match, why weren’t all the children registered and where the heck was Mr Seear, who died in the 1920s but is elusive between his marriage and that point? He was clearly around to father nine children on Emily, at least one of whom really was his biological child, or there would be no DNA match.

By diligent searching I found one of the daughters marrying under a variant of Seear and then a subsequent marriage, under the surname of her first husband, to Mr ‘Forester’, which proved my link to my DNA match.

I did find the baptism of one of the children whose birth wasn’t registered but I couldn’t find the three who had died by 1911; perhaps Emily was counting still-births. There are some large gaps in the children but given what appears to be a rather odd relationship between Emily and Mr Seear that isn’t surprising.

So what do we know about Mr Seear? Given that he is my first cousin three times removed and not a close relative, I hadn’t researched him beyond his name and appearance with his parents in the 1861 and 1871 censuses before. He married in his home area in East London in August 1881, claiming to be a banker’s clerk, yet he can’t be found in the 1881 census, despite my knowing his address just four months later. Seear is a bit of a nightmare to search. Apart from the variants (Seer, Sear, Seeare and many more), it is often mis-transcribed as Leear or Teear, or indeed it seems something else entirely.

I did find a listing for Mr Seear going to Baltimore in 1883. His occupation was ‘agent’. Much as I’d love to think this was some kind of secret agent, I am quite sure it was as the representative of a company or organisation. Perhaps this is why there is an apparent gap between the first child in 1882 and the second in 1886. I totally failed to find Emily or Mr Seear in the 1891 census. I know they were in east London when a child was born at the end of 1891. I tried every technique I know, including search for christian names and dates of birth, without a surname. I tried the 1890 US census in case they all went to America; they were not there either.

I can’t find any children born between 1886 and 1891 when suddenly there were three children born in as many years, perhaps the relationship was re-kindled. There is then another gap before the final child in 1899. I have a baptism for this child on which Mr Seear calls himself a Dining Room Proprietor.

So we reach 1901 and no surprise that Mr Seear is conspicuous by his absence. Sadly, he seems to have kept his name out of the newspapers as well. Emily, describing herself as a married coffee house keeper, is still in the London area, with six children, including the mother of my DNA match but who is using a different christian name (I suspect an enumerator copying error as the names, although very different, have the same number of letters and shape).

Fast forward to 1911 when Emily and three children are in the south of England. Lo and behold Mr Seear turns up, living in London with his brother, claiming to be unmarried and working as a caterer for a licensed victualler. Two final sad entries, which show that Mr Seear spent time in the workhouse before he died.

This has taken me all morning but I am pleased to be able to untangle the tale. Shame about the other 16,000 unidentified DNA matches!