Samara’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Find Samara’s biological father

Samara is a Canadian adoptee that was in search of her biological father. She had already found her biological mother, and had taken an AncestryDNA test to see if she could find him.

To Samara’s surprise, her results showed that her birth father was someone of a very distinct Middle Eastern ethnicity. As a result of this, she had very few paternal matches. However, she did have one match in the 600cM range- who just had a name, no tree or additional info on his profile. Samara had messaged him and not received a response.

After a bit of searching, I managed to find her match “Martin” on Facebook, and to our surprise, he lived all the way in Australia, near my own biological mother. It is not often that the searches take me outside the Canadian bubble but it is always interesting when they do. I told Samara that I had found her match, and that he lived near my birthmom, who was going to try to help us out and see if she could find anything on him that could be helpful to Samara’s search, and Samara was excited to know there was an additional set of eyes on board.

We started going through Martin’s Facebook friends list to see if there were any connections to Canada, but there didn’t seem to be any friends that lived here. So we started looking at friends of Martin’s friends, and on one post, my birthmom found that a man had commented to one of Martin’s friends, sending well wishes from Canada. Intrigued, we checked out his Facebook page, and the resemblance to Samara was uncanny. He looked exactly like her- and lived only a province away from where Samara was born.

Though we weren’t sure what the connection between this man and Martin was, Samara composed a thoughtful message that eventually was opened, and then they started to chat. It turned out that this man was first cousins with Martin, and had lived in the city where Samara was born! After a video call and trading details and pictures, it turned out that this man was indeed Samara’s biological father. They are happily getting to know each other and plan to meet in the coming months! Thank you very much to my birthmom for helping out with this one- you are a great detective!