His origins were as remarkable as his naval career, and they complicated the DNA identification in ways that the researchers had to address directly.
James Fitzjames was born on July 27, 1813. He was the illegitimate son of Sir James Gambier, a Royal Navy officer. His mother’s identity has never been established from the surviving record. The Gambier family acknowledged his existence but managed his public identity carefully, and he was raised by a clergyman named Reverend Robert Coningham and his wife Louisa. His close relationship with the Coningham family was real and lasting — he maintained contact with William Coningham, the Coninghams’ son, throughout his life and wrote letters that have been preserved — but the official record of his birth and parentage was managed with the discretion that the Victorian social code applied to illegitimate children of prominent families.
The obscuring of his paternal line had practical consequences 176 years later. Finding a living descendant who could provide DNA for comparison required tracing through the Gambier family, which meant tracing a line that official records had deliberately obscured. That work was done by Fabiënne Tetteroo, a historian and master’s student at the University of Portsmouth who had been researching Fitzjames for years — including writing a book about him — and who had developed an unusually detailed knowledge of the family tree. It was Tetteroo who identified Nigel Gambier as a living relative in the paternal line through which a Y-chromosome match might be made.
Before the DNA work, Fitzjames was known primarily from two sources: his letters, which provide a vivid account of his personality and of the expedition’s first weeks, and the note he co-signed on April 25, 1848, in the final months of the expedition’s disintegration. The DNA identification added a third: the mandible and tooth that now carried his name.