Beth’s search

Search goal: Find Beth’s biological father

*All names have been changed

Beth’s search was another one that took many months but finally came to a conclusion recently. Beth reached out to me back in February for help with her paternal side. She had found her biological mother but needed some help with her paternal side.

She had been chatting to a paternal match for a while and already had a tree written on paper which was great and very helpful. I was able to tell who the common ancestral couple was of one of Beth’s paternal grandparents, so I started working my way down from there. Many of Beth’s matches seemed to be from one group but as I went further down in her matches, I could see another more distant group, connected by the Warner last name. The reason these matches were more distant was because they are still in England which is typical of Ancestry matches- MyHeritage is often better for people in North America looking for European family. I could see that someone with the Warner last name had married into the large tree that Beth and her match had already created.

After a few weeks and some research, I believed I had narrowed it down to two brothers as the potential birth father. Beth got in touch with their surviving sister Cathy and explained the search, and Cathy was very nice and even offered some family information and provided the ages of the two brothers- this narrowed it down to likely being the older brother because there was a bit of an age difference. Cathy also agreed to take a DNA test so we would know for sure that we were on the right track- there just wasn’t a close enough Warner match to definitively prove it.

Two months later, Cathy’s results were in and she was in fact a full aunt to Beth as I thought she would be. Unfortunately Beth’s biological father has passed away, but she now has her answers as well as a kind new aunt and many other new family members.