Daniel’s search

Search goal: Find Daniel’s biological parents

*All names have been changed

This is a case from back in the spring that I missed doing a writeup for. Similarly to Lisa’s search, one biological parent has been confirmed, and the other parent is between one of a few siblings.

Daniel reached out for help finding his biological parents. He didn’t have any information, but he did have lots of close DNA matches on Ancestry, so he added me to his matches and I started the search.

Like always, I sorted the matches and got 4 distinct groups, which was great. Many of these matches had trees so making mirrors trees was easy. I found the marriages between the groups pretty easily and knew I was looking at a Side A and a side B, but didn’t know which side was which. Now that we had the trees sorted out, Daniel reached out to a first cousin match in hopes of finding more information.

Amazingly, this cousin said that one of his aunts had placed a child who had moved to England (Daniel did not mention this information to the cousin). The cousin also said the adopted child had a brother. The cousin offered to get the brother in touch with Daniel, and then we waited.

A few days later, Daniel messaged to say that he had found his brother! The brother even had paperwork that lined up with Daniel’s adoption information. Sadly his birth mother had passed away just a few years ago. Daniel and his brother spent hours on the phone talking and catching up.

Now that we knew which side was the maternal side, I went back to the tree and eliminated the sisters from the large sibling set I had narrowed it down to. There were 5 brothers, though 1 had died a few years before Daniel had been born. Unfortunately, none of the 4 brothers have tested so without matches, non identifying information, or confirmation from the birth mother, it is impossible to know who Daniel’s birthfather is at the moment. There is one close paternal match that is likely a half sister or half niece, but she has no tree and I have been unable to find more information. This entry will be updated if Daniel’s birth father is found.