Kelsey’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goals: Find Kelsey’s biological parents.

Kelsey reached out for help earlier this month with her search. She was adopted and hoping to find her biological father, as well as her biological mother and two maternal half brothers. Kelsey knew her biological mother’s name, and had had some contact with her in the past, but was hoping to find her again.

I started by taking a look at Kelsey’s AncestryDNA matches. Kelsey didn’t recognize any matches and wasn’t sure which ones were maternal and paternal. So I sorted the groups and they resulted in four groups: two of Welsh ancestry, one Ukrainian, and one English. From Kelsey’s ethnicity splitting, I knew the Welsh side would be one bio parent and the other bio parent would be half Ukrainian/half English.

I figured it was best to find Kelsey’s biological mother’s side first, so I started looking for the common last names in each group. I found that one of the groups was connected by the last name Belton, which was the last name Kelsey had for her biological mother, so I reasoned that this group was likely Kelsey’s maternal grandfather’s line.

After building a tree out for the Belton family and finding the common ancestral couple, I found a grandchild that had moved from England to Ontario and had married a woman with a very Ukrainian first and last name. I quickly found their obituaries and saw Kelsey’s mother listed.

I built the rest of the Belton family tree out, and found an obituary of Kelsey’s maternal aunt. Using the names in the obituary and in the condolence guest book, I found some of Kelsey’s family members on Facebook, including her two maternal half brothers.

Now that we had the maternal side sorted, I turned my attention to the two Welsh groups. Most of the matches were actually still in Wales, but thankfully had good trees, and though it took a few days, I was able to build out the trees and find the couple that connected the two match groups and had immigrated to Canada. Amazingly, one of the trees that helped me with the research was a tree done by the man that turned out to be Kelsey’s bio dad (though he had a tree, he had not DNA tested).

The couple that came to Canada from Wales had had two sons and a daughter, so we figured it was one of the sons that would be Kelsey’s biological father. We reasoned it was most likely the one that had stayed in the province Kelsey was born in, and he was relatively active on Ancestry- so Kelsey sent him a message and after some time of messaging back and forth, he did say he had known Kelsey’s biological mother.

Kelsey is now in contact with both her biological parents and is glad to know more about her biological origins.