I have a pretty interesting story to share, but not a lot of time to share it... So, in a nutshell....

Recently my great grandmother died. Some of her last words were about the father of my grandmother, who she never wed, was a 'one night stand' with a doctor who served during WW1. She was a librarian living in Picardy, France. As most of you history buffs will already know, a location very prevalent in WW1 (the Somme). From what she told us, they had a very brief affair of around 2 months, before he was killed. During this time, she got pregnant with my grandmother and moved back home to England.

Here is where the story gets interesting. After the war, she received a letter from a German woman named Olivia Hanover who claimed she was related to the man. It is not clear wether she was his wife, sister, mother or not, as she did not say. My great grandmother was far too traumatized by the experience to ever relive it and go back, and destroyed the letter..

Several years went by and she found a box of his belongings not long before remarrying and having several more children. In the box was a list of addresses, names and letters to his wife (during the war). She says that upon reading some of the letters, she discovered that he came from an "incredibly wealthy" and "well known" German family, possibly even of Royal descent, though she was very old and forgetful at her age and did not remember any of the names beyond the woman who sent that original letter. The fact that he came from a very wealthy family is of course very intriguing for us, I would love to know the truth about my family tree.

I naturally did a bit of googling to try and shed some light. I found that Hanover is actually a german royal house, there is a lot of information over on Wikipedia about them though there is no mention of Andreas (which may or may not have been his real name, since she said his friends called him Hans).

So I guess what the ultimate question I have is, how can we go back to those times to find out where our bloodline comes from? Is Ancestry.com reliable? would we even get close?

None of the letters or documents survived the years since this all happened. My great gran was just 18 at the time. If anyone has some ideas how we can dig further I would appreciate it.