Derek’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Find Derek’s biological mother

This one is actually one of the first searches I ever did, near the end of 2020. I was cleaning up trees on Ancestry recently and found that I had forgotten to write this one up. Derek’s search is unique because I only used 23andMe results, instead of Ancestry like I usually do or a combination of the two.

Derek knew his birth parents’ ages and had a possible last name for his birthmother. He also had heaps of non-identifying information with birthdates of grandparents, siblings, and more unique information. Using the few matches from 23andMe, I was able to tell what side of his matches’ family that Derek was on, and it did indeed seem like they were maternal matches. I started building a research tree and was able to build out a family tree for Derek.

I quickly was able to narrow it down to the couple who I believed were Derek’s maternal grandparents. The birthdate of his grandfather matched exactly with his non-identifying information, as did the amount of siblings in his obituary. He also had the same last name that Derek had as a possibility for his birthmom. However, I had six sisters to look into! Through a little Facebook digging, I was able to find Derek’s birthmom because of some birthday posts that confirmed her age and year of birth, and that helped to figure out which sister it was.

Derek was in awe that I had figured it out so quickly, and honestly, so was I. 23andMe is not the best resource for genealogical searches, and I always recommend testing with Ancestry first, and then 23andMe if you don’t have much luck with Ancestry.