Quote Originally Posted by Cyclops View Post
Thanks for that detailed comment.
One of the satisfying aspects of detailed family history research is that it gives a sense of being 'grounded', so I'm not sure how I'd react to being in your wife's situation. Could be most unsettling to say the least.

I've got an odd situation in my own family re adoption. One of my ancestors was a powder monkey at Trafalgar and despite deserting from the Navy, he received a medal with a Trafalgar bar which according to newspaper reports he wore proudly until his death. I wondered what had happened to his medal as there's a direct line from him down to my mother. Recently, there's been a lot of publicity about an HBOS fraud case (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...aces-jail.html). One of the guilty (who had a yacht called Powder Monkey) has my mother's maiden name. He had a blog in which he boasted of his family connections with my ancestor - even having his Trafalgar medal. He claims to be the grandson of my great uncle. But my mother told me years ago that he and his brother were adopted. I've searched the Births Registration Index exhaustively and can't find either of them there, so I'm pretty sure she was right.
Uhm, I’m not sure what you can do in these circumstances as you only have quite a tenuous connection with this person. If I’ve got it right it’s the grandson of your mother’s uncle (your great uncle) you are talking about? In my wife’s case she was seeking information about herself of course, so relatively straightforward.

A long shot: do you know the place of birth and date of birth of the man? You could then check the birth indexes and see who was born in the place on that day. There would only be a relatively small number of males born that day/place and maybe eliminate them one by one? The man you are tracking will disappear from the records as he takes on his adopted name, whereas the others will go on to adulthood, get married, maybe have children….. a long laborious process. Even then that will only give you his birth-name which may not lead anywhere. I can’t see any other way around it short of writing to the bloke in person (I assume he’s in jail) or are there any other relatives that you know of that you could contact?

When we started working on my family tree back in the late 1970’s we just happened to look up my wife’s details. We lived near London at that time so it was easy to go to St. Katherine’s house and look her up in the indexes there. In those days the entries were hand written but her name was not listed? We just assumed that the omission was a clerical error and did not follow it up. Knowing what we know now, of course her name was there all the time but it was her birth-name!! The great irony is that we could have discovered she was adopted back then but the repercussions would have been significant as her parents were still alive at that time. Maybe it was meant to be the way things turned out