Danielle’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Find Danielle’s biological father

Danielle is an adoptee who reached out for help in search of her biological father. She had no non-identifying information, but had done an AncestryDNA test. She sent me an invite to her match list and I got started.

I’ll admit, at first I was worried I wasn’t going to be able to help much. She had less than 150 matches and the top paternal match was only 210cM! Nevertheless I started sorting the match groups and they split into 6 groups. Since Danielle knew her birthmother’s side, I could tell that at least 2 of the groups were from her maternal side. The other four, I wasn’t sure about. From the four remaining groups, I was only able to find the common last name for one of the groups as there were not many matches, and even less had trees.

I started making a research tree for the group we will call the Somers group. I figured out that the top paternal match Josephine- her grandparents were the common ancestors for the Somers group, so I started looking at the siblings of her mother. Thankfully, there weren’t too many siblings, and I was surprised to quickly see that one of the Somers siblings had married a man with the last name St George. The top match Charles from another match group, had St George as one of their grandparents. So I started researching the St George family, and it was a great uncle of Charles who had married Josephine’s Somers aunt. So that narrowed it down quite a bit.

I knew from obituaries that the St George/Somers couple had 8 grandchildren, and one of them was likely going to be the birth father of Danielle. There were only 3 grandsons, and one of the grandsons was half Italian. Danielle had no Italian DNA so I figured it was not that grandson.

So I focused on the other two grandsons, who were brothers, thinking that it was between them. I searched the first one on Facebook and was surprised to see that Danielle looked very much like him and his family!

After carefully crafting a message, Danielle reached out to her presumptive aunts, who were able to get her in touch with their brother, who confirmed the details Danielle knew. We had found her birthfather! Danielle is looking forward to meeting her biological family members soon.