My grandfather wasn't who I thought — now I'm retracing his footsteps

Times

2 days ago

Fordington in Dorchester is little changed since local Thomas Hardy hymned the 'intra-mural squeeze' of its passageways and thatched cottages with their eaves 'thrust against the church tower'. Today the centre of the action in this bucolic spot is Bean on the Green, a vintage-styled café where tables spill onto the slopes of the green and a board advertises Dorset Pilates, oat lattes and afternoon teas. Apart from that, it's the same sleepy scene a man named Bernard Sheppard strolled through in December 1944, before boarding a steam train for Penzance and a fateful tryst with my grandmother Virginia.
Five million Britons have taken a DNA heritage test since 23andMe launched the first genetic home-testing kits in the UK in 2014. Many of these curious souls have been rewarded with a genealogical shock, in the form of a'non-paternity event', or NPE. The International Society of Genetic Genealogy estimates that 1-2 per cent of contemporary Britons have an unexpected father, with these numbers rising to 10 per cent at grandfather level.
The travel companies Ancestral Footsteps, run by the former BBC Who Do You Think You Are? genealogist Sue Hills; Ireland's Roots Revealed; and Kensington Tours (which teams up with genealogists from Ancestry Pro on its Personal Heritage Journey packages) have crowded into the market, using clients' DNA results to offer tailored 'roots tours'. These tours explore clients' ancestors' lives by, for example, taking them for a pint at a forebear's local boozer; visiting the cemeteries she or he is buried in; or peering at homes they inhabited. These can be self-guided, or with a professional genealogist in tow.
My own DNA detective journey began in 2019, at the age of 42, whenI took a DNA heritage test through Ancestry DNA (spitting into a vial and posting it off). Soon after receiving my results, I was contacted by Kevin, a sixtysomething from Texas who ventured that I might be his close genetic relative. A second surprise email arrived, this time from Beverly, a 69-year-old based in Rye.Beverly knew she had been adopted in Dorchester in 1955 and that I was her close relative; either her first cousin or half-niece. 'I wonder if the family knows about me …' she wrote, searchingly.
Thus began a quest that led to the discovery my father's father was not, as I'd believed, a mild-mannered Brummie butcher named Sidney (I grew up in Birmingham), but a brewery worker from Dorset who had fathered at least ten children in his colourful life. These children included my dad, Ken, and Beverly, who was adopted. After we followed the DNA trail to its only plausible conclusion, Kevin, Bernard's nephew, wrote: 'Bernard was charming, but I'm afraid was a known rogue.'
I planned my trip from my home in Lewes, East Sussex, to Bernard's home town, Dorchester, with the help of genealogists from AncestryPro, Ancestry.com's professional genealogy arm. As far as surprise ancestral homes go, I had struck lucky. The Dorset market town retains many of the features of Bernard's day, from the grassy adumbrations of the old Roman amphitheatre at Maumbury Rings, where I enjoyed a spectral sunrise jog, to the High Street's lofty Georgian townhouses (many still going by their Victorian names), and the red-brick muscularity of the Eldridge Pope brewery, where census records located Bernard working as a cashier totting up the sales of its 'celebrated strong ales' in 1939. These days the site is a glossy Dorchester restaurant and shopping district, Brewery Square, and the old 'bonded store' where Bernard dispatched brews on the train to London has been reborn as an industrial-chic tapas and cocktail joint.
The Ancestry.co.uk genealogist Simon Pearce says the UK makes for rich rewards for DNA sleuths. 'There's plenty left to see: cemeteries, churches your ancestors attended, former homes that are still standing.' Pearce has a special interest in family history during the wars and says that as far as DNA big reveals go, my story is run-of-the-mill. 'The Second World War saw young people called up and sent across the country and to the other side of the world,' he says. 'It also brought well-dressed American and Canadian servicemen to the UK at the same time as life was unpredictable and people, rightly, feared they might die tomorrow.' Little wonder, then, that shock parenting events, as well as divorces, spiked in the 1940s.
• Read our full guide to Dorset
I'm staying at the King's Arms, a Georgian coaching inn that was recently renovated by the boutique hotel group Stay Original. The group's managing director, Rob Greacen, gives me a tour of the hotel's unearthed original features: the 17th-century posts that led to the inn's stables, a 16th-century inner room and a 1950 restaurant menu that was discovered tucked in a wall cavity and is now framed in the hotel's smart, American-style bar. The menu advertises steamed chicken with mushroom sauce and boiled potatoes with a choice of fruit jelly or sprats on toast for dessert, which Greacen agrees doesn't sound like the sort of fare to put lead in a philanderer's pencil. These days the King's Arms is a more toothsome proposition, with gourmet à la carte breakfasts including local smoked trout omelette Arnold Bennett and, in its smarter double rooms, freestanding bathtubs commanding the old Georgian bay windows.
The next morning I stroll around Victorian Borough Gardens, where, in Bernard's day, brass bands would have blasted out rousing tunes from an ornate painted bandstand. Then I head on to the Shire Hall Museum, a preserved Georgian courtroom and jail that's now a tribute to the lowly souls who passed through its notorious docks, from the Tolpuddle Martyrs to children imprisoned for infractions such as stealing vegetables. It stands as a timely reminder, not to romanticise the routinely hard-knock lives of those who went before us.
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Back in the King's Arms, a smoking room occupies the spot where wagon wheels and horses' hoofs would have clattered through the gates of this ancient wayfarers inn. I dine here on crispy Dorset coast fish, a dish Bernard might have recognised, although the wild garlic aïoli and samphire might have confused a 1940s lad (mains from £18). Time moves on, and lemon posset with pumpkin seed biscotti finds favour over fried sprats for pud.
After a week on the DNA trail, I think I've cleared up the mystery of how Virginia and Bernard met, with local records showing Bernard's family link to generations of sailors who lived between Weymouth and Sennen Cove, a few miles from Virginia's native Pendeen. I'll never know the full truth about Bernard and Virginia's rendezvous, though I feel this mission has given me a fresh appreciation of our emotionally open — and gastronomically improved — modern times. I also have a sense of my secret grandfather's life from the houses, streets and pubs he passed through. Here's to you, Grandad, you old rogue.
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Sally Howard was a guest of Discover Dorchester (discoverdorchester.co.uk) and the King's Arms, which has room-only doubles from £150 a night (thekingsarmsdorchester.com). Curated DNA heritage tours from Ancestry Pro and Kensington Tours start from £276 (progenealogists.com)