Monty’s search

*All names have been change

Search goal: Find Monty’s maternal grandfather

Monty’s brother-in-law reached out with permission a while ago for help finding Monty’s maternal grandfather. Monty’s mom did not know her biological father, so he had done a DNA test to try and uncover his identity.

Monty knew his three other grandparent lines, so the matches were sorted neatly into four groups, with one being the mystery maternal grandfather line.

I took a look at the mystery match group and immediately something jumped out at me- the matches were all Americans, which was notable because Monty and his mother were from England. I also was keeping in mind that I was looking for someone born around the turn of the 20th century and had been in England at the start of the 1920s.

Monty’s first match in the mystery group in the 500cm range, and was from a very specific town in Indiana, which I thought was interesting, because the rest of the matches were all from Kansas.

The second match was a lady named Lucy, who appeared to be in the second cousin range to Monty, due to the DNA centimorgans, and also her mother and grandparents were the same age range as Monty’s.

I kept searching and eventually found another match under 40cm whose great-grandparent was a sibling of Lucy’s great-grandfather William. Since Lucy was a much closer match, I wanted to see if Monty was getting any matches from William’s wife Audrey. So I searched Audrey’s maiden name, and several matches came up, including a 109cm match whose great-grandfather was a sibling of Audrey.

Now I knew I needed to look at the sons of William and Audrey. They had three sons, and one was the grandfather of Lucy so I knew that I didn’t need to look at him. One of the brothers had several searches supporting the evidence he was living in Kansas when Monty’s mother was born, and had not ever travelled to England.

The last brother, I found a consular application stating he had been living all around England since 1915, and had returned to the USA in 1921, a year after Monty’s mother was born. When he returned, he moved to that specific town that Monty’s top mystery match was from! We theorized that match was a half first cousin and one of his biological grandparents is the man who is Monty’s maternal grandfather.

Monty and his family are glad to have uncovered their family mystery.