I can’t remember how many years ago I saw it, but there, in an Ancestry hint, was a glaring error on someone’s Family Tree about my maternal great-grandfather. Not that I was an expert in family history back then, or now, for that matter, but I knew the information was wrong. I mean, really wrong, as in, the wrong person – a totally different person, not just a misspelled name. I could have contacted the owner of the tree to point out the error of their ways but I chose to ignore it. It wasn’t my problem, I rationalised, so why bother? And there was no point in taking note of any particulars of the person in question because the information was just so wrong, right?

Years passed and my research skills increased, well, at least I thought so. I had learned the value of looking at DNA matches and what information those shared-matches had on their trees; and I had learned (the hard way) the importance of verifying information before adding it to my tree. But no matter how hard I worked, there were still too many brick-walls, and my maternal great-grandfather was one of them. How could I have DNA matches to my maternal great-grandmother, and not one to her husband?

Sometimes a different approach is needed. It was a long-shot, but I typed my great-grandmother’s name into a website called Trove that links to hundreds of years worth of newspaper articles across Australia.

Like a stunned mullet I sat staring at the first article that appeared. The year was 1901, and it was about Annie, my great-grandmother. But who was the man named alongside her in the article? Whoever it was, Annie had appealed to the police for help, and they had issued a warrant for the man’s arrest for desertion of an illegitimate child. I was gobsmacked! The name of the alleged deserter triggered a memory of the Ancestry hint I had dismissed all those years earlier. They were the same person!

The next article in my search of Trove was published a few months after the previous one. Another shock. The police advised that the warrant for the arrest had been withdrawn, as Daniel had married Annie, just a few months before the birth of my maternal grandmother (their second daughter).

Armed with the new information, I started researching Daniel through Ancestry and Trove, and bingo!, there he was. It might have helped that he didn’t follow a straight and narrow path in life because the newspapers recorded some of his exploits, including a fine for having a wallaby skin hanging on the wall of his shed, and a court notice for verbally abusing a railway station attendant.

Perhaps the most alarming information came from Ancestry, and has since been verified for accuracy through DNA matches. Daniel married Annie in Sydney in May 1901. And he married Vera in South Africa in 1902. A few years later Daniel brought his new family back to the area that Annie and their two daughters lived in.

How do I know the information about his second marriage is right? Because a granddaughter from his second marriage is a DNA match with me.

And that explains why I couldn’t find DNA matches to Charles, who we always believed was Annie’s husband and the father of their daughters. I’ve not found any record of a marriage between Annie and Charles, and there were no more births recorded for Annie. Interestingly, my grandmother used Charles’ surname as her maiden name when she married my grandfather.

Luckily for our family history, my maternal grandfather recorded vital information on Annie’s death certificate. The certificate records Daniel’s surname as Annie’s married name, and Charles’ surname as ‘also known as’.

If I hadn’t looked for Annie on Trove, Charles would still be an impenetrable brick wall. And if I had taken more notice of what I thought was an error on someone else’s family tree all those years ago, I might have saved myself a lot of angst.

My oops! nearly didn’t end well, but luckily, I found the real story.