A friend tested his DNA thru ancestry.com and was pleased with the results, I had an account with ancestry that I gave my mother who was into genealogy, I decided to test my DNA it came back 25% Eastern European Jew, my mother didn’t believe the results and got her DNA tested it came back 50% Eastern European Jew, the Jewish heritage came they her father who died when she was a child, all we know was he immigrated to the US in the early 1900s and went by the name of Thompson, hardly a Jewish name, he also was an orphan
Your story proves my point.
Any reasonably intelligent adult in the year 2005 with access to an Internet connection and with a few names and dates supplied by the family Bible or old letters and such should have been able, within four weeks, to trace things back several more generations.
Unless you have a "mystery person" like your grandfather in the mix - that is obvious!
My remarks above obviously do not apply to people who are 1) adopted or 2) have a near-ancestor "without a past."
So, "her father died when she was a child." Well, didn't her mother have any papers on her husband? Old keepsakes (birth certificates, photos of her dead hubby's siblings and parents, etc.)?
(Never could understand how effectively some people would erase their pasts - die without leaving behind memoirs, family stories, photos, old birth certificates, etc. - stuff everyone of course takes and today digitizes and places on the Internet so that distant cousins can profit from them.)
Regards,