Podcast: Matthew's story    • DNA Family Secrets: Where is my fathe...  
Nearly a 100,000 people in Britain were brought up in foster care in the 1970s, 48yearold Matthew was one of them. Although he knows his birth mother was English, he has never known his dad's identity.

So, let's start right from the beginning, what is it you're trying to find out?

I grew up in a white foster family not knowing anything about the black side of me. I want to find out if there's anything out there you can find that's, going to help me fill that void. It's almost like a colouring book, that's kind of, it's been filled in with all these lovely colours, but there's a part of it that's, I can't colour anything in.

I'm right and thinking that you know that your biological mother is a white woman?

Yeah.

What do you know about your biological father?

Very little, I've been told that he’s black, and that's it, really little.

When you're a child, especially when you're a child in care, you want to fit in with everyone, you just want to be the same as everyone else. So anything like that, that made you different, you wanted to run away from that.

So last year with the black lives matter, I think it forced everyone to take a good hard look at the realities of racism. And with that I felt I couldn't look at that before looking at myself and looking at the part of me that I hadn't really looked at. So, for me it was a kind of double whammy.

There's just this gaping hole when it comes to your biological father's side.

Well, this book is the white side of me, but there's another book isn't there, that's got empty pages.

Matthew is on his way back to the University of Leicester with his partner Raphael. Turi and the team have been analysing Matthew's DNA, to finally discover where his father was from.

Come on in.

Hello.

It's lovely to see you again.

Nice to see you too.

Your question was really around your ancestry. You knew that your mum was white, English, but I know you had questions around the ancestry on your biological father's side. So, I know that you were told that he was Jamaican. Now people from Jamaica have got really mixed ancestry and that's because the history of the island. So, it was plantation economy and the laborers who worked on those plantations, were mainly African. So let me show you on a map.

The majority of slaves that were brought over from Africa were from this area, so in with Nigeria and all sort of this west coast of Africa. So that's essentially where I am expecting to find matches for you.

Okay.

If your father was Jamaican. That's not what we were getting, your main matches on your father's
side are here.

Oh wow, okay.

Your strongest matches were east Africa, Madagascar, Mozambique, Kenya, but also places like the Philippines, Indonesia.

Wow.

Thailand, China.

Wow.

You're also getting matches in France. So, you actually have this really wonderful mixture of DNA, but the results that we were getting time and again were really pointing very clearly to a particular place. Your father was not from Jamaica, he was from the Seychelles.

Really, wow. I'm astonished actually, I wasn't expecting that. I don't know too much about the Seychelles, but okay hopefully you're going to enlighten me.

I am, so they are islands off the east coast of Africa, so not even inhabited until the 16th century and not really sort of, you know, properly colonized, until it was by the French, in the 18th…
So that would be the French connection…

Your matches are coming back as French Creole.

French Creole?

Creole from the Seychelles.

Oh wow.

Yeah.

Now Creole essentially means a mixture of African and European. People who live there now are descended from slaves, and freed slaves, who were working on the plantations. So again, so these are things like, you know, coconut, cotton, sugar plantations, but really fascinating history because you've got people from Europe, but we can also see from your DNA that you had a few ancestors from east Asia. Sort of traders and adventurers who've got sort of you know, Arab, Persian, Chinese, Indian origins.

Wow that's really interesting isn't it. It's like a new beginning for me almost. About half of me that, you know, that was lying dormant.

The surnames that you're getting in the family trees, that you are matching, are names like Payet, Riviere, Morel. So French names, those are the ones that are coming back in your family tree.

Okay.

Far more glamorous isn't it.

It's very glamorous.

So, the matches that you're getting are distant cousins, so it's very difficult to use that to start to be able to trace who your biological father is. But obviously these databases are growing…

Yeah.

All of the time. It may well be that somebody pops up on the database, who's a close relative.

So much to think about, thank you very much.

You're welcome.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000...

Representation: https://www.josarsby.com/turiking