Exploring a mystery in the GARLAND family

Without a deep dive into my DNA test results, I would never have discovered my newly found Melbourne cousin and he would be none the wiser about the identity of his maternal grandfather.

Meet my great-grandfather, James Garland (1865-1929); he looks like a fine upstanding gentleman, if perhaps a little portly around the middle. He has the air of a bank manager don’t you think? Which is indeed what he was for his entire adult working life, entering the service of the Union Bank at age 13 and managing various branches of the bank in New South Wales and Victoria for over 40 years. James died in Sydney twelve months after retiring from the bank’s Hamilton branch in Victoria, following complications from an operation.

James Garland fathered five children to Annie de Clare Tyrrell, who he married on 15 July 1891. The first-born son, who died before he was a year old, was followed by a daughter. Then three sons were born: Lovick Tyrrell Garland in 1896, James Ardlethan Garland in 1898, and my maternal grandfather, Scott Garland, who was born six years later in 1904. After spending their childhood years in Hamilton, Lovick Tyrrell and my grandfather moved to, and remained in, the northern states of Queensland and New South Wales from early in their adult lives, working primarily as station managers. However, James Ardlethan followed in his father’s footsteps, joining the Union Bank in Hamilton at any early age and remaining in that occupation his entire working life. He never married and remained childless…or did he?

A mystery DNA match

It took me a while to have a really close look at my DNA test results and shared matches; limited time combined with a lack of expertise sent my brain into meltdown every time I tried to grapple with how to sort and make sense of centiMorgans, segments and estimated relationships. Whilst hiding my head as far down in the sand as I could, I took the opportunity to test my mother, aunt and brother, thinking that gathering more DNA evidence would miraculously result in some ready-made flow chart of DNA connections. It didn’t. All I managed to establish with certainty was that my brother and I were 100% siblings, despite his ongoing taunts during our childhood that I must have been adopted.

Procrastination came to a halt when I enrolled in a 16-week course on Analysing Your DNA Results, run by the Society of Australian Genealogists. DNA enthusiast, Chris Woodlands, guided us through the myriad of options to sort through matches, including coloured ‘dotting’ to allocate matches to specific family lines and comparing shared matches. Gradually working through this process enabled me to divide most of my higher DNA matches into either maternal or paternal lines and then, working on Most Recent Common Ancestors for those with linked trees, into specific family lines. So far so good and my aim of adding to my traditional research findings with DNA evidence as a further proof point was going well. I had no mysteries I was trying to solve and finding distant cousins was just an interesting bonus of the exercise.

However, one significant match remained stubbornly unallocated. Stuart Matthews* was a very close match for someone I’d never heard of, with a name that didn’t appear in my fairly large family tree. I made contact with Stuart and gained access to his small family tree, but there was still no joy – there were no names that overlapped.

However, there was this tantalising message from Stuart’s son, Brian:

Hi Philippa… This could be a very long bow to draw, but we don’t know who my paternal grandmother’s father was… Perhaps that could be a link? Such an interesting journey.

Enter the Garlands

I could see from our Shared Matches that Stuart was descended from the Garland line, which was my mother’s father’s paternal line. I had already established that my 2x great-grandfather John Garland (James senior’s father) had been quite a busy man when it came to procreating, siring not only 12 children with his wife but at least four illegitimate children with four different women – but the relationship with Stuart Matthews was too close for it to be connected to one of John’s illegitimate children. There was a connection much closer to home. My own ancestry was clear and there were no gaps as far as I could see – so I presumed Stuart Matthews was descended from one of my great-grandfather James Garland’s 11 legitimate siblings. In hindsight this reasoning was irrational, but I went with it at the time.

Initially, I wasn’t overly fussed about not knowing where Stuart fitted into my tree as I felt I had all my ancestral ducks in a row and had limited time available to explore the more distant cousin curiosities. I put the dilemma in the too-hard basket for a while and got on with other things. But I don’t like unfinished business; I found I was getting edgy about needing to finish that particular jigsaw puzzle.

I decided to use the sparse information I had from Stuart Matthews’ tree to craft an experimental Matthews Ancestry tree of my own, just to see what hints it threw up and to clarify my thinking. I wasn’t necessarily convinced the connection was going to be through the missing paternal grandfather, so I tried not to limit my investigations to that one line. Whilst I was able to build out various branches of Stuart’s tree, there was still one bit that didn’t budge – the identity of his mother’s father.

So, I started to look more closely at Stuart’s mother. June Erica Rice was born to Florence Elizabeth Rice in Melbourne in 1926. I had no family members in my Garland tree who had ever lived or worked in Melbourne. Other than her two marriages and children, I could find no other relevant details about June’s life. The family had very little information about her origins – her birth, marriage and death certificates contained no details about her father, and the only family hearsay was that she was born as a result of an affair her mother had had with a married man. June’s mother, Florence, had been twice married and widowed – the second of these to William Rice, who died in 1920, and with whom she’d had five children between 1908 and 1916. June, born ten years after Florence’s fifth child with William and six years after his death, was given the surname Rice and absorbed into the family.

The story of unraveling this mystery is continued in Garland Secrets – Part 2.

Read more about family history secrets and why we keep them.

*Names have been changed to protect the identity of the living.