For the past six years I’ve been trying to find information about this mysterious Asian side of my heritage. Seriously, even though my mother and her sister were born in Hong Kong, and my grandfather was too, it never entered my mind that there was any Asian genetics involved. We were English or Scottish. My grandfather went out of his way to wear the Hunter tartan during his retirement years in West Vancouver. I never once thought of any of my family being even remotely Chinese.
I’d made a tree on Ancestry back in 2000 and had picked away at it. adding relatives as I found them. My mother had passed away in 1978 but her sister was still alive. She had an excellent memory, and when asked, gave accurate and very detailed descriptions and stories. The thing I found out later, is she didn’t volunteer anything about our Chinese genetic connections. I didn’t know anything, so I never asked. She passed away in 2007 and along with her, that wealth of information, that I still didn’t know she knew.
So, in the fall of 2015 I received an answer to a message I’d left for an Ancestry.com member. Initially I got only a passing interest until they did a DNA test, then they sent the following message:
My wife, Diana, and I have both done the Ancestry DNA test and Diana’s, results received yesterday, are the most surprising – only 17% GB but more than that, 5% (3% – 6%) East Asian. We know of no Chinese or other East Asian influence, other than both George and his father, William being out there, so come to the conclusion that either William Leyland, or his father, had a child by a Chinese woman; theoretical percentages in the DNA would then be 6.25% or 3.125%. One of William’s daughters was called May; could this have been Mei, a popular Chinese name meaning “beautiful”? I think the only way I am going to be able to pursue this is to go back to Kew and to go through births in Shanghai and Hong Kong.
Bit of a spanner in the works but have you considered doing the Ancestry DNA test, too? This would help in confirming the possibility of the Chinese element in both your and Diana’s lineage.
All the best, C.
So, needless to say, I took the bait and sent away for an Ancestry DNA testing kit. About the same time I mentioned all this to my cousin in the states ( she’s actually a second cousin, once removed but I can’t be bothered with all that so I just call her cousin! ) Well, she liked the idea and also sent for a test and so did her mother, who lives in the UK and is at the same branch level as me.
To clarify these relationships in the simplest terms, we all descend from three Hunter siblings. Me from my grandfather Tobias Hunter, born 1877, in Hong Kong ( so he said ) My USA cousin and her UK mum, descend from my grandfather’s sister May Hunter, born 1879 in the Treaty Port of Foochow, China ( according to her passport ) and the final one, also in the UK, descends from one of my grandfather’s two brothers, George Hunter, born 1876, likely also in Hong Kong. *Note: they could all have been born in Foochow, as that’s where all this began.
So, back to the DNA. Our results all came in and not surprisingly, we all showed Asian ethnicity estimates, which varied from a low of about 3% to a high of 12%. Those estimates have since been risen slightly as the Ancestry database grows larger. We all trace back to William Leyland Hunter who was born in Manchester, UK in 1844. What we can’t substantiate is the maternal side of that union. We now have a name, and an alias, dates of birth and death, a burial, a grave with a marker, yet we still don’t know who this woman really was or where she came from. That is my goal! I’ve made this blog in the hope of generating new clues and hopefully helping others with similar searches of their secret Eurasian family roots!