SHE has always been a strong supporter of marriage; now it has emerged that her great-grandfather was even more enthusiastic about matrimony.

Dana, the former Eurovision winner, has expressed sadness at discovering that one of her ancestors was a bigamist who had families in Ireland and Britain. The singer, who won election to the European Parliament in 1994 on a family values ticket, was presented with the evidence on Who do You Think You Are?, the RTE genealogy series.

Dana is the second person to discover a bigamist in the family tree thanks to the television series. Charlie Bird, an RTE reporter, was told that his grandfather, a respected figure in Macroom, was married simultaneously to women in Ireland and Britain.

Dana has also discovered that a great-great-grandfather died alone in a poorhouse and another set of great-grandparents eloped to Scotland to marry because one was Protestant.

The singer was stunned by the story of her great-grandfather Hugh Hassan, who worked as a docker. He disappeared in 1902 leaving her great-grandmother, Susan, to rear three small children.

Records indicate the Londonderry shipworker was married to two women at the same time and commuted between his two wives for several years. He fathered a child in England before returning to Derry to father Dana’s great-aunt, Mary, in 1901. Soon afterwards he deserted his Irish family.

Dana told the programme that her grandmother, Nellie, carried the trauma of her father’s disappearance for the rest of her life. “I’m glad my great-aunt Mary is not alive any more. She would have found that devastating,” Dana told the programme.

“He left his wife with three children when it really wasn’t a good time to leave a family. I’m glad there is some sort of closure on what happened because there was always a question mark on whether he deliberately disappeared, made a new life and married someone else, or something happened to him and he died and couldn’t come back. I’m sorry for him because he missed out on three wonderful children and a wonderful wife.”

Genealogists discovered that he almost certainly married Margaret Gibbons with whom he had two daughters, Nora and Rose Ellen. Nora was born in England just a year before Dana’s great-aunt Mary was born in Derry in 1902, indicating that the shipworker travelled between the two families for a time.

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