Maria’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Find Maria’s biological parents

Maria is an adoptee whose daughter reached out for help with her mom’s search. All they knew was that her mom had been born in Montreal.

Maria’s daughter added me as a collaborator on her mom’s Ancestry results, and I took a look. I was very surprised to see that Maria had no French ancestry! Still, she had lots of matches that helped make this an easy search.

Maria’s matches split into four main groups, with some of the top matches being from two groups, so it was easy to see the divide between maternal and paternal groups. However, I had no way of knowing which matches were maternal/paternal.

I started to make a tree for two groups, which were tied together by a man who immigrated from Northern Ireland, and his wife, who was from Sweden. They had settled in the prairies and had 4 daughters and 2 sons. Eventually, most of the family moved even further west. The 6 kids were all in the right age range to be a parent of Maria, except for the youngest daughter who would have been too young.

I was also able to rule out two more daughters, as Maria had matches to a daughter and grandson of them. That left one daughter and both sons. Keeping in mind that Maria had been born in Quebec, I started looking into the three siblings to see if any had been in Quebec in the year before she was born. And indeed, one of the brothers lived there, and had gotten married in Montreal two months after Maria was conceived. Unfortunately he has passed away, but Maria hopes to connect with his children to see if they can share more information about him or even take a DNA test.

Having the birth father mostly confirmed, I looked at the two other groups, who were tied together by a couple from Ontario. This couple had just three children, two daughters and a son, and the daughter of one of the daughters was a first cousin match to Maria, who had also been placed for adoption.

I found records of the other daughter living in Montreal around the time Maria was born. Unfortunately Maria’s birth mother had also passed away, as has her only son, but Maria does have a half nephew match through him that she hopes to connect with soon.