Lily’s Search

Search goal: Find Lily (and Mark’s) biological parents

*All names have been changed.

Lily reached out to me last month for assistance with her search. Lily and her twin brother Mark had been placed for adoption in the 1960s and she wanted to find her biological parents. So I came on board as a collaborator on her matches and got started!

While sorting Lily’s matches, I only got three groups after doing the Leeds method. Two of the groups were French, one of the groups was Scottish, and each family group had members that were born in a certain town in Massachusetts. But curiously, I was unable to find a marriage or link between any of the groups. I worked on making mirror trees for almost a week with no success.

I then asked Lily if she had any non identifying info, and she did have one paper with some information. Her non identifying information provided the approximate ages of her birthparents and their parents, as well as the number of siblings Lily’s birthmother had. It also stated that Lily’s birthfather’s father had passed away before Lily was born, but that the other three grandparents were living.

With this new information, I went back to the trees, deciding to focus on the Cadieux family as Lily’s highest match Richard was from this group, and I suspected he was a first cousin of one of Lily’s biological parents. I created a chart with all the if/then information from the non ID and started looking at the years of Richard’s maternal aunts and uncles. I determined that Lily’s biological mother’s side could not be the Cadieux side because the years did not line up. However, Richard had an uncle that had died before Lily was born, and the uncle’s wife was the exact age as described on the non identifying info. I searched around and found two sons who were living, and two daughters who had passed away. Thinking it was one of the brothers, I cautiously sent a message to Richard, who was very pleasant and eager to help with our search. He gave me his contact information I passed it on to Lily, and she got in touch with him promptly.

Richard told Lily that there was actually a third son, Allan, who had never married and had passed away several years ago. I found Allan’s obituary- I hadn’t found it before because he had not been mentioned in his sisters’ obituaries. Richard sent Lily some pictures of Allan and he looked just like Mark! His age lined up with the non ID and we knew we had found Lily and Mark’s birth father.

Richard was also able to contact Allan’s brothers, who remembered Lily and Mark’s birth, and remembered how it was a big family secret, and were very glad to hear that they were doing well. The brothers also remembered the name of Lily and Mark’s birthmother Mary, who is still alive, and provided Richard and Lily with contact information. Richard called Mary, who had some memory loss, but did indeed remember Lily and Mark and seemed open to hearing from them.

Thank you to Richard for being so helpful with this search, I couldn’t have done it without him! Lily and Mark are meeting Richard in person this weekend and calling Mary for more family information, and we hope to find out how those two other groups fit in to the family tree!