Rosemary’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Find Rosemary’s biological parents

Rosemary is an adoptee who was looking for some help identifying her birth parents. She had done an AncestryDNA test and was waiting on information from her province’s government. She also knew the approximate years her birthparents were born in, her birthmother’s last name, and the sound of her birthmother’s first name (think Berry=Marie). With this information in mind, I started to look at Rosemary’s DNA matches.

Rosemary had tons of matches due to having a full French Canadian background, though there were no matches over 400cM. I was able to sort the matches into four groups, although there was a little overlap between the groups, I was able to see two groups were going to be from one side of Rosemary’s tree and the other two from the other side.

I started by placing the matches who had good trees into a research tree and finding common ancestors. I kept seeing some names come up repeatedly but since many of the names were coming up in all of the match groups, it was hard to narrow down exactly what the common last name of each group was. I did see Rosemary’s birthmom’s last name in one of the groups, which was promising, although I kept in mind that it was a very common French last name.

I also started to look at Rosemary’s top match Maisie, who was around the first cousin once removed level, and her son had also tested. Masie was about a generation younger than Rosemary. Maisie also had a unique first and last name, so it was easy to find her parents. I started tracing her paternal grandfather’s side and found that his side was connecting with two of Rosemary’s match groups.

I looked at Maisie’s paternal great aunts and uncles as they were around the age Rosemary’s birthparents would be. I noticed one of Maisie’s great uncles Simon had married a lady with the same last name as Rosemary’s birthmom (we will call this lady Adeline). They were only a year apart and were also born in the approximate years Rosemary had been told her birthmom was born in.

Hoping this was more than a coincidence, I started to look into Adeline and found that Adeline’s parents were lining up with the other two sides of Rosemary’s matches. I also realized that Adeline’s sister’s great grandchildren were some of Rosemary’s closer matches.

I looked into when Simon and Adeline had married, and found that they had married three years after Rosemary was born, and had a daughter exactly one month after they were married. The daughter even has a very similar name to Rosemary’s birthname! Adeline also often went by a nickname that sounded exactly like the first name Rosemary had heard.

After closely checking the ancestral lines of Simon and Adeline, and other information fitting the known info, Rosemary’s sister (who I communicated with for this search) was also confident Simon and Adeline were Rosemary’s birthparents. After looking around for adoption information papers Rosemary had recently received, it was confirmed that Adeline was Rosemary’s birthmother. Rosemary is pleased to know more about her biological origins.