I have combed through the tree of a dna match of a second cousin once removed trying to find evidence that suggests anyone of the males in her tree, fit the story we have about the identity of my husband’s grandfather while making sense of the 170 cMs match.

So far most of the males either died young or didn’t have any documented descendants nor did they fit the story. I’m trying my best not to rely on the story because it comes second hand and anyone that can confirm any of the facts have long passed.

There is one individual that comes close but that would make them 3rd cousins and the cM count seems too high to be that distant.

So I’m wondering if my next step should be to trace the females to anyone who might be living and see if I can convince them to take a dna test to see if I can get a closer match. Because as it stands there isn’t a single DNA match with our last name, only matches who are descended from or distantly related to people with our last name.

We thought for a while that maybe we aren’t Hyams’ at all until the closest match we’ve found had a grandmother with our last name.

The trouble is, that it seems to me that any of the descendants from the women in that line would typically result in 2nd cousin matches. So essentially I need someone from the older generation to test to see if I can get a first cousin match or aunt or uncle??

Ugggh this is so messy and confusing. My husband has some relatively rare medical symptoms that we haven’t found an official diagnosis yet and it would help soooooo much to find ANYONE from that line who could give an accurate family medical history. Cause we’re talking about brain tumors and shit (pardon my French).

ETA: I don’t know if it’s a British things but I’ve been searching for obituaries that list the surviving members of the family and I have not been able to find ANYTHING on any of the deceased relatives in the tree I’m building.

So if anyone on this sub lives in in the UK and could help me with this, I would greatly appreciate it (I have the Newspapers dot com subscription, I’ve also been isolating the British newspapers that are for each individual area/towns where these relatives have died.)