Marina’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Find Marina’s paternal grandparents

Marina reached out for help finding her paternal grandparents. Her father was adopted, and Marina had his birth registration that had his biological mother’s name (Sandra), and used this to find the residence of Sandra and her parents when Marina’s dad was born.

When Marina’s AncestryDNA results came back, I took a look at her matches, and sorted her matches into three groups. Two of these DNA match groups aligned with Marina’s previous findings, confirming the identities of Sandra’s parents. The third match group was from Marina’s paternal grandfather’s side.

We found Sandra’s brother’s obituary from earlier this year, which listed Sandra as living, but did not give a last name. A local library provided an obituary of Sandra’s father, which also did not list a last name. Despite finding some of Sandra’s relatives on social media, we still were unable to find Sandra.

I switched gears and decided to look at Marina’s paternal grandfather’s side. The matches were distant, with the exception of one match in the 200cm range, who did not have a tree. I was able to tie a few of the distant matches back to a German couple from Ontario, but could not get any further.

In the meantime, Marina uploaded to Gedmatch in hopes of finding additional matches there. This 200~cm match, Lily, was also on Gedmatch, so I encouraged Marina to reach out to Lily and see if we could find the connection.

Lily was able to tell from her AncestryDNA matches that Marina was a maternal match to her, and provided her maternal grandparent’s names. I traced their trees and quickly found that Lily’s grandmother also connected back to that German couple I had found a few matches tied to. Lily’s grandmother only had one brother, who was now deceased, so it was now fairly easy to see that Lily was a second cousin to Marina and we knew who Marina’s paternal grandfather was.

Marina had also started messaging with a fairly close match that was descended from both of Sandra’s parents. Based on her DNA match, age, and lack of maternal tree, we figured that this match was a half first cousin to Marina. After some back and forth, Marina’s match shared that her mother was also a child of Sandra, and was aware of Marina’s dad and was very happy to find him. When Marina eventually got her dad’s adoption paperwork back, this confirmed the identity of Marina.