DNA Story: The Curious Case of Rick Lovering's Mother

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 13:32:41 +0000

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https://turiking.co.uk/
Rick Lovering's family isn't quite what he thought it was. A 40-year search has revealed a strange secret about his mum. For her entire adult life, she pretended to be someone else.

It was actually when my brother needed to get a passport, that she told us that she wasn't actually married to my father. Which started my long search of trying to find out who she really was, because she wouldn't tell us.

Rick's research found that his dad had been married before, but the relationship ended, and he moved away, but they never divorced. He then met Rick's mum…

Probably got her pregnant, so he just told my mum to assume his wife's identity. He hadn't seen his wife for a few years and just hoped and prayed that she'd never turn up. And I think once that lie began, you couldn't get away from it.

But they pretended to be married and went on to have six children, one of which was Rick. He now knows his mum lied about being Irish and also told stories of watching football in London, going to New Zealand and even being able to speak Russian. Rick still doesn't know which ones are true.
But this search changed when he had a DNA test. It revealed he had no Irish heritage at all. He found out his mum was adopted and then he made a new family tree, which has brought him here to Poulton, in Somerset, and the surname Church.

John and Emily Church, who are buried over there, would be my great grandparents, in other words my mum's grandparents. And they had 10 children, and there was one daughter, in particular, had a child we knew called Kathleen. So, I ordered Kathleen’s birth certificate and when the birth certificate arrived, it actually had the same birthday as my mum.

And I saw 12th of May, that's her, that's her.

Rick's written all this in a book, the next story though will be finding people in Somerset who knew his mum, or at least think they did. Andy Howard, BBC Points West in Paulton.

What an interesting journey. I'm delighted to say that we're joined by the DNA expert from DNA Family Secrets, that's Professor Turi King. Turi welcome to the program, it's nice to see you.

DNA doesn't lie does it, but people sometimes do?

Absolutely and just the sort of work that was done there is exactly the sort of work that we do on DNA Family Secrets, in terms of tracing people's relatives for them.

But you prepare people, don't you, in advance and say look this might not work out exactly as you hope it will. So, I mean it's an emotional thing isn't it.

It is and, I mean, I've been doing this sort of thing for a couple of decades now and it's always preparing people for the fact that they may have some unexpected findings, and the thing about DNA Family Secrets, is obviously we have on board, social workers, and we have, you know, psychologists and so on and so forth, who support our contributors all the way through the series.
We saw in Rick's story that that was all about, you know, an unmarried mother, and trying to sort of cover that up, now that wouldn't happen these days would it, but it was, I guess, fairly commonplace not that long ago?

It was, sadly, I mean this is the thing about unmarried mums it was something that was a source of shame. And it's such a sad story, to hear that she had to go along with this pretence for so many decades, and then taking that secret to the grave.

But social habits, social norms have changed, haven't they, so much now?

Oh completely and this is something, so when, on series one for example, we had one of our contributors, Margaret, who was looking for her… she was adopted, she was looking for her mum, and it was a not the same story, but a story where a woman from Ireland had given up her child for adoption. And we were able to trace her mum for her. These days we hardly really think about it at all, but in that time, it was, there was a big social stigma attached to it.

I'm going to take you back much further now, to the days of Richard III and the finding, under the car park, and your role in that, in identifying him from his DNA.

Yeah.

That must be the most exciting thing you've ever done?

Well, I don't know, DNA Family Secrets is right up there. So, Richard III, yes, I led the genetic analysis which proved that these were the remains of Richard III. So that was a really extraordinary project and because my background was in archaeology to be to begin with, I was able to be on the excavation and then go all the way through and do the genetic analysis and test the DNA, from the remains, against living relatives of Richard III. So yeah, that was that was an amazing project.

I'd love to have a longer chat with you, perhaps we will one day. Thank you so much for coming on and well done for the show.

Rick Lovering "Your Father and I Never Married"
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Your-....Father-Never-Married

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