Kimberly’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Kimberly’s biological maternal great-grandparents

Kimberly reached out to me recently for help finding her maternal grandfather Albert’s parents. She knew he had been born and adopted in Ontario in 1915, and had done an AncestryDNA test hoping to learn more. Though I wasn’t sure I’d be able to help, as it was rather far back to search, it turned out that it only took a few hours to provide Kimberly with answers, to both of our surprise.

I took a look at Kimberly’s maternal matches and split them into a few groups. Kimberly’s maternal grandmother was from Eastern Canada, so there were lots of matches from that line, but she did have a few distinct groups from Albert’s side, all with recent English ancestry I sorted the matches into a few groups- the largest group was connected by the last name Renwick, and there was a smaller group connected by the last name Goddard.

I started to look at the Renwick group and saw a few of Kimberly’s closer matches were descended from a lady named Grace Renwick who had come from England to Ontario. She had been born in 1895 and was in the right age range to Albert’s mother, but Grace had been married in 1919 in Northwestern Ontario near the Manitoba border, which was quite a ways away from where they thought he had been born.

I decided to search Grace’s last name in Ontario’s birth/marriage search, as her real last name was quite distinct. After doing so, I found a Toronto marriage record in 1915 for a Hazel Grace Renwick, who had many similarities to Grace- same age and birthplace, but their parents had different names.

I kept searching, and then found a birth registration in 1915 for a son of Hazel Grace- and this son was born on the same day, month and year as Albert! Furthermore, the registration even had a stamp that said he had been adopted, included his post-adoption name, and his adoptive father’s name. It was a genealogical jackpot. The registration also had Albert’s biological father’s name on it, who was Hazel Grace’s husband. I traced his family and found his mother’s maiden name was Goddard, which aligned with Kimberly’s DNA.

I kept searching Hazel Grace and her husband, and found that Hazel Grace eventually moved to where our first Grace had gotten married in 1919, and Hazel Grace got married in the 1930s, with her marriage record interestingly indicating she was a spinster and not divorcee. I am still researching them, but I think Hazel Grace and Grace may be the same person, and the DNA match levels to Grace’s granddaughters also supports this. As for Albert’s biological father, he also remarried a few times and had some kids, and I was able to find some of Kimberly’s mother’s half first cousins. Kimberly is very happy to know more about her grandfather’s biological origins.