Sara’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Find Sara’s biological father

Sara is an adoptee who was looking for help finding her birth father. She had found her birthmother, and had tested with AncestryDNA, so Sara knew what matches were from her maternal side. She also had some non identifying information, which gave us information such as approximate age, that the birth father’s father was deceased, his mother was elderly, he had been born in a specific province, and he had one older sister who was married.

I took a look at Sara’s matches and saw she had several small groups of English and Scottish matches. Her paternal matches were all very distant. I was only able to find the common last name of one of the groups, but it was enough to start building a research tree. I found the common ancestors of this Thompson family, and started to work back down.

I found that many of their children and grandchildren had come to Canada from England, so I started to add a picture of the provinces that children and grandchildren had died in so I was able to more easily see what provinces the descendants lived in.

Keeping in mind the non-identifying information that was hopefully truthful, I found a man in the Thompson family that had died in the province that Sara’s birthfather had been born in. He had a son, Richard, that was born around the year Sara’s birthfather had been born in.

I was curious if Sara would have matches from Richard’s mother’s family, so I traced her family lines and quickly found that one of the matches from another group were indeed from Richard’s mother’s side. I knew Richard was the man Sara was looking for. After some additional information from a semi distant relative, Sara learned that Richard had older sister who we were able to find an obituary for. This helped Sara get in contact with closer relatives, and she is looking forward to learning more about her paternal side and connecting with more relatives soon.