Anna’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Find Anna’s biological father

Anna reached out for help a while back finding her biological father. She had been told his full name, but had been unable to find him, and Ancestry matches were not responding to her. So I offered to help her out and see what could be found.

Anna’s paternal matches split into three unique groups: A Welsh group, an Iranian group, and a Spanish group. No matches were part of more than one group, but I started working on the Welsh group first as that was the group with the most matches.

Pretty quickly I was able to connect the Welsh group and the Spanish group based on the common last names of each group, and I believed I had found Anna’s paternal grandmother Rita. She had married a man named Bill with the last name that Anna’s biological father had, though Anna had no DNA from Bill’s side. Based on the amount of Iranian DNA Anna had, we reasoned that her biological father’s own father was fully Iranian.

We could not find obituaries for Rita or her husband, so after thoughtful consideration, Anna sent a message to Bill’s brother, who chatted back and forth with Anna and confirmed that Rita did have a son Rick with the name Anna’s mother had given her. He also shared Rick’s last name that he had been born with, which helped with finding Rick’s brother, but we were still unable to find Anna’s biological father online.

Bill’s brother offered to reach out to Rick’s brother to try to get contact info for Rick, and Anna looks forward to learning more soon.