Trudy’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Find Trudy’s biological father

Trudy reached out for help looking for her biological father, who she had heard was a man named Robert. She had done an AncestryDNA test and was hoping to find him.

I took a look at Trudy’s matches and did the Leeds method on them as I always do. Trudy also had a tree of her maternal side, which was helpful, so I quickly saw that two of the match groups were maternal, and two were paternal.

One group we’ll call the Fischer family and the other group was the Braun family. After building out the trees a bit and placing matches into it, I found the couple that linked the families, and then looked for their children, knowing that a son would be Trudy’s biological father. Surprisingly, the couple only had one child- a son named Carl.

To my surprise, after telling Trudy of my findings, she told me that she and her cousins actually recognized Carl’s name and his children- they had known each other as children. Unfortunately, Carl has passed away, but Trudy reached out to her half siblings, who remembered her and were happy to exchange photos.