Sadie’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Find Sadie’s maternal grandparents

Sadie reached out a few months ago for help finding her maternal grandparents. Her mother, who had passed away, was adopted. and Sadie was curious about her maternal ancestry, so she had taken an AncestryDNA test in hopes of discovering more.

Sadie did not know what matches were from which parent, so I sorted her matches and built out her dad’s side to see if we could label any match groups as definitively paternal. I was able to find that Sadie’s top match was her dad’s maternal cousin, which helped, but there were still several smaller match groups.

I encouraged Sadie to upload to Gedmatch to see if that would help with determining any matches were from her maternal side. So she uploaded to Gedmatch, and right away, I saw that several kits were actually managed by a friend/fellow genetic genealogist of mine, Kayla, and some shared X DNA with Sadie. On Ancestry, Kayla’s managed matches were not from Sadie’s dad’s side, so we knew that this group, the Frankson family, was one of Sadie’s maternal groups.

With Kayla on board, we looked at the Frankson tree and found the common ancestors from the Frankson family. Though they were from out east, one of the Frankson children had moved to British Columbia, where Sadie’s mom was born, so Kayla and I figured that Sadie was likely descended from this Frankson.

After a lot of digging, Kayla figured that Sadie’s mom was likely a daughter of a lady named Penelope. Penelope had unfortunately passed away several decades ago, but she had a living half sister, Lois, who Kayla was in touch with, so Kayla connected Sadie and Lois, who agreed to do a DNA test to confirm the hypothesis.

A month and a half later, Lois popped up in the perfect range as great half-aunt, so we knew Sadie’s maternal grandmother’s side was complete.

Due to Sadie’s maternal grandfather being from a population that does not have many testers, her matches are quite distant on this side, and it is impossible at the moment without closer matches. However, if any progress is made, this post will be updated accordingly.