This is a consolidation of two blogposts from 2021, telling the story of how I identified the parents of a baby found abandoned in a Philadelphia park at the age of three weeks, in 1917. There have been no new developments since then, but I wanted to have a single account of the story in one place. Some names have been changed below; some have not.

In 2020 as the pandemic hit and indoor hobbies became suddenly more important, I sent a DNA sample to Ancestry.com (I had already done so with 23andMe) and waited with excitement for the results. Within a few weeks, I received notification that my sample had been processed, and eagerly checked to see who my closest genetic matches were among Ancetry.com users.

Six of the top seven were easy enough to work out. Three of them were descended from siblings of my mother’s maternal grandmother, an Ulster Presbyterian born near Coleraine in the middle of a family of nine. Another three of them were descended from siblings of my father’s maternal grandmother, who was one of eleven children of a thrice-married Pennsylvania steel broker. One, however, who I will call “Bella”, did not seem linked to either of the other two sets, and so I wrote to her in curiosity.

It became clear after some back and forth that Bella’s brother “Derek” and sister “Patricia” are also linked to me on Ancestry.com. The strength of their relationship to me appeared to be something at the level of third cousin (shared great-great-grandparents) or fourth cousin (shared 3x-great-grandparents). They had joined Ancestry.com to see if they could solve a family mystery: their mother had been found abandoned in a Philadelphia park as a baby. That story is told in a newspaper article from 25 August 1917:

All very dramatic. To jump ahead, the baby was adopted by a Philadelphia doctor and his wife, and grew up to marry her high school sweetheart, who became a university professor in Illinois. They retired to Vermont, where she died in 1987, with no knowledge of who her biological parents were from seventy years before.

As it happens, my grandmother was born in Philadelphia in 1899. But from the DNA, there was no chance that the baby in the park could have been her secret child; in that case, Bella, Patricia and Derek would have been my half-first cousins, and our DNA would have overlapped at around 6% rather than the 1%-ish that was actually the case. (In fact, two of my half-first-cousins on my mother’s side are on the DNA sites, and both score about 8% of overlap with me, which is more than average but within the normal range.)

Also, though this is supporting rather than conclusive evidence, my grandmother’s life is an open book thanks to her somewhat oversharing memoirs, and there is no hint of a secret teenage pregnancy.

Bella, Patricia and Derek, all born in the 1940s, knew nothing more than what is in the newspaper article about their mother’s origins, and were somewhat frustrated by the opacity of the DNA results that they got, and also by not always getting hugely helpful information from others who they had contacted on the site. I corresponded back and forth quite a lot with Patricia, and eventually she agreed to let me look at her own links on Ancestry.com.

She has a lot more close relatives on Ancestry.com than I do – starting of course with her siblings Bella and Derek, and then another five who are all genetically her second cousin or closer. The top two of those five, I quickly realised, were both descended from a couple who I will call Hugh and Peggy, born in the 1890s, who married in 1919 in Philadelphia. The next three were all related to Peggy’s siblings, but not to Hugh. It seemed pretty clear to me. The baby in the park’s mother was certainly Peggy. The baby’s father was definitely not Hugh.

Peggy’s family lived less than a mile from Fairmount Park in Phildelphia, where the baby was found. She is recorded as being a professional musician in the 1910 and 1920 censuses. She and Hugh appear to have had a baby together in 1916, but they did not get married until he returned from the war in 1919. Their marriage did not last, and the 1930 census records that Peggy and their child were living in Philadelphia while Hugh was living with a new wife on the West Coast.

Hugh died in the 1930s, and Peggy successfully applied for a pension as his widow, with dependent child, from the Veterans’ Administration, suggesting that their divorce, and Hugh’s other relationship, may not have been formalised. As noted above, several of Patricia’s DNA connections are descended from their child born in 1916; but as far as I can tell, they had no other children together. (Actually I have no genetic proof that the 1916 baby’s father was Hugh, but he seems to have acknowledged his own paternity.)

Reading between the lines, I speculate that Peggy and Hugh had parted company around the time that their child was born in the first half of 1916, and she and another chap got together towards the end of that year, with the August 1917 baby in the park as a result. But by the time the 1917 baby was born, Peggy and Hugh had reconciled or were about to reconcile. Hugh had just been drafted for the war, and the new baby was surplus to the requirements of the rekindled relationship.

So Peggy took a sad walk to the park that warm August evening – or more likely, perhaps, her mother did, if the reports of the older woman in the area are correct. I find this really heart-breaking: Peggy gave up her baby to a completely uncertain future, for the sake of a relationship which had already failed once, and was destined to fail again.

The note left with the baby said that “The mother died at childbirth at the age of 22. The father, a professional singer, travels, but has now gone to the war.” None of this was true. The mother had not died, was 27 rather than 22, and it was she who worked as a professional entertainer. We’ll get to the baby’s biological father in due course, but I will reveal now that he was an industrial executive who did not go to fight in the war at all – though Hugh, the baby’s stepfather, was about to. To quote G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown:

“Suppose someone sent you to find a house with a green door and a blue blind, with a front garden but no back garden, with a dog but no cat, and where they drank coffee but not tea. You would say if you found no such house that it was all made up. But I say no. I say if you found a house where the door was blue and the blind green, where there was a back garden and no front garden, where cats were common and dogs instantly shot, where tea was drunk in quarts and coffee forbidden — then you would know you had found the house.”

Since I was not related to Peggy, nor to Bella, Patricia and Doug’s father, that meant by a process of elimination that the father of the baby in the park must be a relative of mine. I originally thought that it might have been quite a distant cousin, who lived in New England and was a travelling salesman, but on reflection I realised that his relationship to me was too distant to explain the strength of the DNA links between me and the siblings.

I worried away at this. My grandmother’s mother had strong Pennsylvania family links; but the limited DNA evidence pointed instead to her Massachusetts-born father’s side of the family. I went back to look at the list of my grandmother’s first cousins, rather than anyone more distant; all descended from my grandmother’s paternal grandparents, a couple who I will call Bill and Sally, born in the 1810s, who lived all of their lives near Boston.

I realised that I had missed one interesting candidate, who I will call “Edward”, son of Bill and Sally’s older daughter. Edward’s older brother “Chris” had moved to California in 1909, so I had ruled him out, but I had somehow failed to notice that Edward and the middle brother “David” had stayed in the East. David spent his whole life in Massachusetts, but Edward moved around a fair bit. He actually died in Philadelphia during the second world war; and, digging a bit further into the records, I discovered that he had also spent a lot of time in Pennsylvania from 1907 to 1917, including, crucially, that he lived in Philadelphia in 1916, exactly when the baby in the park was conceived.

To say that I was excited was an understatement. I realised also that although Edward was not himself known to have had other children, I had identified two of Chris’s great-grandchildren, Edward’s great-great-nephews, on another genetics site, myheritage.com – identified as “Henry” and “Ian” on this diagram.

Patricia needed little persuading to let me upload her DNA sample to myheritage.com. If I was right about Edward being her grandfather, then the link between her and Edward’s great-great-nephews should be around twice as strong as the link between her and me; second cousins once removed, as opposed to third cousins.

On a Saturday morning, my email pinged with a message from myheritage.com. I clicked excitedly to their site to see the analysis. Would it prove my theory that Edward was the father of the baby in the park?

Er, no. Patricia’s link with Henry was actually weaker than her link with me. And her link with Ian was so weak that it was off the scale of measurability. My Edward theory looked to have been completely blown out of the water.

I went back to the drawing board. Specifically, I went back to 23andMe, the website where I had first signed up for this kind of thing. After a bit more digging around, I realised that no less than three other known descendants of Bill and Sally, my great-great-grandparents, were on the site. And we knew that the father of the baby in the park must have been a mature man in 1916. If he was also a descendant of Bill and Sally, there were only seven males in the right age range:

• Bill and Sally’s sons, “Albert” and “Brian”, aged 62 and 60 in 1916;
• Bill and Sally’s daughter’s sons, Chris, David and Edward, aged 46, 43 and 35 in 1916;
• Albert’s son “Frank”, aged 32 in 1916
• Brian’s son “George”, aged 23 in 1916.

Luckily four of these had descendants on 23andMe – Chris’s great-great-granddaughter by his eldest daughter, who I’ll call “Jo”; Frank’s great-granddaughter “Kate”, also Albert’s great-great-granddaughter; a great-grandson of Albert by his second marriage, who I’ll call “Lenny”; and me, great-grandson of Brian and great-nephew of George.

There is no need to go into complexity here. It’s pretty simple.

• If Chris, David or Edward was the grandfather of Patricia, Bella and Derek, then Jo is their half first cousin twice removed (Chris) or their second cousin twice removed (David or Edward), and their DNA should be closer to Jo’s than to Kate’s, Lenny’s or mine. (Already pretty much excluded as a possibility, by the myheritage.com results from Chris’s great-grandsons Henry and Ian.)
• If Frank was the grandfather of Patricia, Bella and Derek, then Kate is their half first cousin once removed and their DNA should be closer to Kate’s than to Jo’s, Lenny’s or mine.
• If Albert was the grandfather of Patricia, Bella and Derek, then Lenny is their half first cousin once removed and their DNA should be closer to Lenny’s than to Jo’s, Kate’s or mine.
• If Brian or George was the grandfather of Patricia, Bella and Derek, then I am their half second cousin or half second cousin once removed, and their DNA should be closer to mine than to Jo’s, Kate’s or Lenny’s. (Already pretty much excluded, because their links to me should be a lot closer than they are, if this was the case.)

The balance of probabilities already pointed towards Frank. The DNA evidence that we already had weakened any case for Chris, David and Edward on the one hand, or for Brian and George on the other. That left 62-year-old Albert and his son, 32-year-old Frank; and Frank seemed more likely than Albert to have been at a time of his life when he would have been playing the field.

At this point I needed to persuade Patricia, Bella and Derek to all submit samples to 23andMe. Again, they needed little persuading. It took a while to get everything organised, but the results came back in the end:

For all three of them, the link with Kate was much closer than their links with Jo, Lenny or me. It looked very much like Frank must be their grandfather. As noted above, Kate is their half first cousin once removed; Lenny is their half second cousin; I myself am their third cousin; Henry and Ian are their third cousins once removed; and Jo is their third cousin twice removed.

In general you’d expect the link with Kate to have been a bit stronger, around 3% for a half first cousin once removed, and you’d expect the links with a half second cousin like Lenny to be closer than their links with a third cousin like me, whereas in fact I share more of their DNA than Lenny does. The connection with Jo, their third cousin twice removed, is surprisingly strong as well. But it’s all within the bounds of normal variation.

Another factor elevates this from probability to certainty. 23andMe allows you to do chromosome-by-chromosome comparison. (Since I first wrote this, Ancestry.com has now also rolled out that function.) Very interestingly, Kate shares X chromosome DNA with all three of Patricia, Bella and Derek. We people who have Y chromosomes can only inherit X chromosome DNA from our mothers and not our fathers. (You folks with two X chromosomes have inherited that DNA from both of your parents.) That means that if you share X chromosome DNA with anyone, there cannot be a father-son link in the genealogical link between you, because sons inherit X chromosome DNA only from their mothers.

But Kate’s link with six of the seven potential fathers of the baby in the park does include a father-son connection, which would eliminate any shared X chromosome DNA. Six of them are related to her through the father-son link between Albert and Frank, including Albert himself. The only one of the seven with whom Kate could share X chromosome DNA is her own great-grandfather, Frank. (I myself do not share X-chromosome DNA with any of the other people in the chart, because my link to them all is through my father; my X-chromosomes will be the same as my mother’s.)

(The X-chromosome connection also eliminates one remaining remote possibility, that the baby’s father might have been descended from one of Bill or Sally’s siblings – this was unlikely anyway, since that would have added another one or two steps to the genealogical distance with Bill and Sally’s known descendants, but the X-chromosome link with Kate meant that they had to also be related to Albert’s first wife, who is not related to me.)

So, I was able to solve a century-old mystery. We still don’t know how Frank and Peggy got together, to set in motion the course of events that resulted in the birth of the baby abandoned in the park in Philadelphia. I know that Frank was working in Buffalo that year, as a corporate executive, and also that he visited Washington DC for his business; we also know that his cousin Edward was living in Philadelphia. Perhaps Frank stopped off in Philly to visit his cousin Edward, who was about the same age, and met with Peggy then? (Though Edward was reportedly not close to the rest of his family.) Then again, Peggy was a musician; perhaps she was performing in DC or in Buffalo, and met Frank there? I doubt that we will ever find out.

But we do know for sure who the biological parents of the baby in the park were.

I tend to think, with no evidence at all, that Frank was unaware that Peggy was pregnant with his baby. Though only in his 30s, he was already a wealthy man, and could have made discreet provision for a baby (or indeed an abortion) without anyone finding out about it except his lawyer. It is not difficult to think of scenarios where Peggy did not have Frank’s contact details, though again I tend to think that she made a positive decision to bet on her relationship with Hugh and therefore to keep Frank and his biological child completely out of her family’s future life.

Frank married a woman from Ohio five years later, in 1922, and in due course they had a daughter – Kate’s grandmother. Frank lived most of his life in New York, eventually retiring to the Southern state where his daughter (his younger daughter, as we now know) had meanwhile moved, and where in due course his great-granddaughter Kate was born.

Peggy stayed in Philadelphia for the rest of her life, and as mentioned earlier had no other children (that we know of) after she married Hugh. Her son, born in 1916, married at least four times and had numerous children. He too lived most of his life in Philadelphia, though he went to the West Coast in the 1930s and came back again after the second war. Helpfully, several of his grandchildren are Ancestry.com users, as are some of Peggy’s great-nieces and great-nephews.

This sort of research is really difficult and not cheap, though not eye-wateringly expensive either. We needed Patricia, Bella and Derek to supply DNA samples to two different testing sites, and I think if I had not been related to them myself, it would have taken a lot longer to get to the bottom of the mystery. It would also have been much more difficult if they were not all Americans; we needed a critical mass of not-too-distant relatives who had joined at least one of the DNA testing sites to make the identification possible.

But it’s immensely gratifying to have been able to do this, and in the process I have very much enjoyed and valued getting to know Patricia, Kate and Kate’s parents. In the end, everyone has a right to know where they come from. I have a real job, so I doubt that I will ever make a living out of this kind of work, but it would be really interesting to do it again.