Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Research Grief

I missed last week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun because I moved from Oakland, California to Portland, Oregon the day before, and I didn't get Internet until the Monday after.  Since this week's challenge is a repeat of the one from October 17, 2015, which I posted about at the time, I'm going to answer last week's question instead.

Your mission this [last] week, should you decide to accept it, is:

(1) The Family History Hound listed 20 Questions about Your Ancestor, and I'm going to use some of them in the next few months.

(2) Please answer the question, "Which ancestor gives you the most researching grief?"

(3) Write your own blog post, make a comment on this post, or post your answer on Facebook or Google+.   Please leave a link to your answer in comments on this post.

The ancestor who has been giving me the most research grief of late is my paternal grandfather's biological father.  I used Y-DNA testing to prove that this man was not the husband of my great-grandmother, the man my grandfather grew up with as his father.  Since that time I have been working on trying to determine who the mystery man is.  My grandfather's original birth record did not list a father's name at all.

My father matches two men on 107 of 111 markers based on their Y-DNA test results.  Both of these men have the same last name, Mundy, which I have interpreted to mean it is the likely last name of my mystery great-grandfather.

I started looking for Mundys in and around Burlington County, New Jersey, where my great-grandmother lived.  As she did not have much money, I don't believe she could have traveled much, so my hypothesis has been that Mr. Mundy probably came to her area.  I have focused on Burlington County and Philadelphia, which is close by (just across the river) and the nearest big city.

I did find a Mundy family in New Jersey, but they were in the northern part of the state, so I noted them but put them aside.  I began to look at them more closely when a generous soul named Suzanne McClendon dug up several newspaper articles on Bert Mundy, a member of that northern Jersey family.  Good old Bert apparently was a traveling salesman and a philanderer, making him a decent possibility for someone who might have traveled to the southern end of the state and had a short fling.  Another thing that makes him a good candidate is that my grandfather's name was Bertram and he was said to have been named after a "close family friend."

I've done a lot of research on Bert's family, hoping to find some living not-too-distant cousins who might be willing to do autosomal DNA testing and compare results.  So far I've gone back two generations and brought everyone forward, but none of the lines has any surviving individuals.  Taking it back one more generation is getting to be a little too far to easily determine connections, but it's the most promising path right now.