Michael’s search

Search goal: Find Michael’s biological father

*All names have been changed.

This case was solved in a near record amount of time. Thanks to the help of fellow search angels Danielle and Kameron, we found Michael’s birth father in about two hours.

Some people ask me how I find the people I help with their searches. Occasionally they are family or family friends, but most of them are from a Facebook group for Canadian adoptees and those searching for biological families. There is also a private group for the search angels of the main group so we can discuss cases and get each other’s help.

Search angel Danielle had posted in the group asking for some help with Michael’s case- he had a lot of high matches and she had figured out the man who would end up being his paternal grandfather but needed an extra set of eyes. Michael added me as a collaborator to his DNA matches so I could take a look further, and search angel Kameron had also started working on it in the comments of the post based on some screenshots that had been posted.

I could tell right away that Danielle was right about the man we will call Jeffrey being an ancestor of Michael so then I decided to sort the matches to see what marriage Michael was descended from. Jeffrey had been married three times and had 12 kids total from two of the wives. Michael had some distinct matches to the second wife’s relatives so I knew he was going to likely be a child of one of the sons from the second marriage.

Now most of the 12 kids were deceased except for two. It was a little tricky to sort which children were from which because their obituaries sometimes did not reference who was their mother which was the key factor in sorting the 12 kids. However since the first wife had died rather young it was easier to sort based on that. As well, Michael had an estimated age range for how old his birthfather would have been when he was born. None of the brothers that had passed away seemed to fit, they were all too old or too young.

Another puzzle was Michael’s second highest match Dana who was supposedly one of the 12 children of Jeffrey, and sadly Dana actually passed away only a few months ago. She was matching Michael in the half aunt range, but one of her full brothers had to be Michael’s birthfather. It couldn’t be one of her half siblings from her father’s first marriage because of the DNA matches to the second wife’s family. Something didn’t make sense.

After taking a look at her matches, search angel Kameron and I basically figured out at the same time that Dana was not Jeffrey’s child- she was the child of his wife and someone else. After realizing this, everything else fell into place very fast.

Kameron found an obituary of the living brother’s MIL and FIL which mentioned the living brother’s son’s name… and that son was Michael’s highest match, who was in the half sibling range. We knew it had to be the living brother.

Michael was amazed with how fast we worked and honestly, so was I! Luckily Michael had some great matches that helped confirm the case quickly. Thank you to fellow search angels Dianne and Kameron for helping out with this one!