Claire’s search

Search goal: find Claire’s paternal grandparents

*All names have been changed

Since I have started my volunteering, I have had several people reach out to me that are not adopted, however, one of their parents were. In all of these cases, the parent is deceased and the child is looking out of curiosity or to find some health information.

Claire was one of these people- her father was adopted and Claire was searching for answers. She had a ton of non identifying information which was very helpful. As well, she had a few matches/family members who had been helping her with her search over the last year or two. So they filled me in on the work they had done and then we got to work over the course of a few months. They had already sorted the matches and found the general family names of each of the paternal groups. The matches were rather distant and not higher than 200cm, but nevertheless we had enough matches and family trees to work with.

The non identifying information included things such as locations, ages of the birthparents when Claire’s father was born, siblings, and even the first few letters of Claire’s father’s birth last name.

Claire’s father’s biological mother was easier to figure out as that was the side with the highest match. After putting together a mirror tree, The mother’s age was able to be found through a census, and she only had one younger sister, so it had to be her.

Claire’s father’s biological father is not officially confirmed but I have not been wrong yet during my searches 😉 This was a bit more challenging as I knew that the man had to be a grandchild of a certain couple, but there was a LOT of grandchildren to sift through. However, some of the grandchildren had descendants that are matches in Claire’s list, which eliminated almost all of the children groups. It left two possibilities- one man who would have been the exact age listed in the non identifying information, and another man who would have been a young child. So it is pretty easy to deduce who it was.

This case truly amazed me as we had only distant matches to go off of, but the non identifying information proved to be extremely helpful and the key to solving the case.