Tanya’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Find Tanya’s biological parents

Tanya is an adoptee that reached out at the end of last year for some help with her search for her biological family. She had plenty of identifying and non identifying information, and had even taken a DNA test with MyHeritage. However, some of the names she had were very common, spelt a few various ways, or the spelling was not confirmed, making the search a challenge.

On MyHeritage, Tanya only had rather distant matches, which unfortunately didn’t help much. So I started with the identifying information she had, and started to search for her biological father. With the help of two other searchers, we were able to find Tanya’s birthfather through newspaper articles, who had sadly passed away a few years prior. I built out a tree on MyHeritage and Ancestry, and though the matches were distant, they proved that the identity of the birthfather was indeed the correct man.

Tanya had some half siblings through her birthfather, who she messaged, and to her surprise they knew of her, and one half sister even shared some pictures of Tanya from when she was a child. However, she did not know who Tanya’s birthmother was.

I encouraged Tanya to take an AncestryDNA test, and so a couple months after we had identified her birthfather, Tanya’s results came back. Because she had already linked her tree to her DNA results, it was easy to tell which matches were paternal and which were maternal. There were two distinct maternal groups which I knew would represent both of Tanya’s maternal grandparents.

I started building a tree for one of the groups. Two of the matches were first cousins once removed to each other, but Tanya matched the younger person almost as closely as the older person. I found an obituary of the younger match’s grandmother, and Tanya’s birthmom was listed in the obituary as her daughter!

Tanya’s birthmom had many siblings and half siblings, some with a unique last name, so I looked them up on Facebook and found several. They were friends with Tanya’s birthmom, making her an easy find. Tanya is excited to know her maternal side now and glad to have answers.