Shelley’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Find Shelley’s biological father

I know I haven’t posted many searches in the last few months, but truth be told I am always working on some, and some just take a little longer! Shelley’s, however, only took two weeks.

Shelley was raised by her single mom who had died when Shelley was a teenager without revealing the identity of Shelley’s biological father. So Shelley took an Ancestry DNA test hoping to find him. She actually reached out for help to confirm the identity of who she thought it might be, as she had done her own investigating.

She added me to her matches as a collaborator, and thankfully due to knowing her maternal side, the paternal matches stood out, and she had a lot of them including some matches at the first cousin level, so I started my work and within about two hours had come up with the couple that I figured were her paternal grandparents. When I shared this with Shelley, she agreed she had arrived there too- but there was a complication: the presumed paternal grandfather Ronald had been involved with two of his wife’s sisters and may have had a child with them. Shelley had already been in touch with some of the family who had shared this information with her.

I have had some cases involving 3/4 siblings before, so I remembered how the cm’s would work for descendants of 3/4 siblings. I came up with a few scenarios for Shelley, stating that her biological father was likely a son of Ronald and his wife, as the cm would be different to her matches if it was a child of Ronald and one of his wife’s sisters. She had a presumed first cousin match that was a grandchild of Ronald and his wife.

A few days later, Shelley let me know that her upload to MyHeritage had finished processing and that she had gotten a paternal half brother match! It was the son of one of the two sons of Ronald and his wife, as I thought it might be. Though Shelley mostly solved this search on her own, I was happy to confirm her findings and I am glad she had uploaded to MyHeritage- we could have been wondering about those sisters for a long time!