Jessa’s search

Search goal: Find biological parents.

*All names have been changed

In December, I started to help more people with their DNA results, mostly on Ancestry DNA but also a little bit on 23&Me. One of these people was Jessa, who was searching for her biological parents. She knew her birth last name and the ethnicity of one of her maternal grandparents, but nothing more.

Her matches split perfectly into four groups each representing her four grandparent lines. It’s always ideal when matches split into four groups, but it takes the right conditions to happen- enough people testing from all four groups, and no half relationships. If there aren’t enough matches, there may be more groups as they will split the great grandparent groups if there is nobody at the grandparent level.

Jessa had lots of close matches that also had trees to work off of, which was very helpful. One of the match groups had the same common last name as the one that Jessa was born with. From there, her biological mother was one of three people. I was able to narrow it down to who the birth mother was based on Facebook- the birth mother was friends with many people from one of Jessa’s other match groups (which turned out to be Jessa’s maternal grandmother’s side). She had even commented on posts using language like “cousin” and “uncle” which definitely helps the search!

After brief communication with a match who is Jessa’s second cousin, Jessa was reunited with her biological mother.

Her biological father has not been identified yet, but Jessa’s biological mother may tell her in time, or she may get matches in the future that will help too.