Kelina’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Find Kelina’s maternal grandfather

Kelina’s father reached out a while back for help finding Kelina’s maternal grandfather. Kelina’s mother had never known the identity of her biological father, so I offered to help and see what I could find.

Since Kelina’s maternal half uncle had tested on AncestryDNA as well, it was easy to tell what matches were from Kelina’s mystery maternal grandfather side. She had one decently close match at nearly 400cm, a match in the 200cm range that did not know her paternal side which was where the connection was, and the rest of the dozen or so shared matches dropped off significantly and were all under 40cm. This made sense as Kelina was from a county that didn’t have a lot of AncestryDNA testers.

The top match, AJ, was around the same age as Kelina, and their parents and grandparents were also very similar ages. I started looking at the trees of all the matches that matched AJ, but nothing was jumping out at me. I was thinking AJ might be a half first cousin of Kelina, and one of her grandfathers was Kelina’s maternal grandfather.

I took a look at the more distant matches and a few had basic trees, so I started to build them out and try to find others that were connected to either of AJ’s grandparents. And indeed, one of the matches had a shared common ancestor with AJ on AJ’s paternal grandfather’s side.

Though additional evidence would have been nice, it was enough for myself, Kelina and her father to presume that AJ’s paternal grandfather was also Kelina’s maternal grandfather. His age and location were right, and if it had been a sibling of his, the DNA cm between Kelina and AJ would have been lower. They chatted to AJ and agreed that this was the most probable hypothesis.