Kathy’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Kathy’s biological father

Kathy reached out for help finding the identity of her biological father. Her mother had told her it was a man named Robert McKinnon, the man known to be her father, but Kathy’s DNA results were seemingly not showing any relation to a McKinnon family. So I took a look at her AncestryDNA results and got to work.

Kathy’s paternal matches split into two groups, which was good to see. It meant we had two clear grandparent groups to look at. The first match group I looked at, I could see was connected by the last name Barker. The second group was connected by the last name Perrier- which was the maiden name of Robert McKinnon’s mother. Curious, I started placing more matches into the tree, and quickly saw that Kathy had DNA matches from both sides of Robert’s mother’s parents, indicating a true DNA connection.

We also figured out that one of her closer paternal matches was a granddaughter of one of Robert’s siblings, but she was only matching at the half first cousin once removed level, indicating a half relationship between her grandparent and Robert.

We reasoned that Robert was indeed Kathy’s father, but Robert was the one with an NPE- his father was one of four brothers from the Barker family. Kathy was glad to know the man she knew as her father was indeed biologically so.