Kyle’s search

Search goal: Find Kyle’s biological parents

Kyle reached out at the beginning of the year for help finding his biological parents. He had thought he had narrowed it down to who his biological father was, but he wasn’t sure and wanted some help. He knew his birthmom’s name (later proven to be a fake name) and her age when he was born. So I took a look at his matches on both Ancestry and 23andMe and got to work. Along the way, I even discovered that he was a DNA match to one of my own relatives.

I quickly narrowed in on the set of siblings that Kyle had also arrived upon- two brothers and a sister. He was sure that one of the brothers was his biological father, but after I noticed that the sister, “Shannon”, would have been the same age as the birthmom when Kyle was born, and had been born in the same province, I started to think she was the birthmother. Her name even started with the same two letters that the name provided was.

Kyle then let me know that he had a high match on 23andMe who was the daughter of the man he thought was his birthfather. He sent me a screenshot of the match, and right away I could tell that it was too low to be a half sibling, but it was a perfect match for first cousins. I also noticed that Kyle shared X DNA with this match, meaning that this was a member of his maternal biological family. That helped confirm my theory that Shannon was Kyle’s biological mother.

Shannon had unfortunately passed away many years ago, but she had a few other kids, including one with an extensive tree on Ancestry, and Kyle reached out to him to share his theories. He reached out to me as well, and agreed to do a DNA test to confirm our theories.

As for Kyle’s paternal side, it was an easy search as well as he had lots of great matches. I quickly narrowed it down to a set of siblings- four sisters, who of course we could rule out, and two brothers. Kyle had a match to a granddaughter of one of the two brothers at around the first cousin once removed level, leaving the only possible biological father to be the other brother, who had also unfortunately passed away, but had several other kids as well.

Eventually Kyle’s presumed half brother’s test came back, and proved my findings correct. Kyle is happy to have his answers now.