Richard’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Find paternal great grandmother

Richard’s wife Nellie reached out to me a while back for help with Richard’s family mystery. Richard’s family did not know the biological mother of his paternal grandmother, who had been adopted in the early 1900s as a child. They had found Richard’s paternal grandmother’s biological father, but needed help with her biological mother. They had little information except for a possible last name.

I took a look at Richard’s AncestryDNA matches, but his matches from his grandmother’s mother’s side were very distant- all less than 30 centimorgans, and many did not have trees. I tried to make match groups, but was finding it impossible to find anything concrete. Most of the matches were also in Ireland or had very recent Irish ancestry.

I looked at the other sites Richard had uploaded his DNA to, which included Gedmatch, FTDNA and MyHeritage. He did have one match Jane in the 70cm range on MyHeritage that appeared to be from his paternal grandmother’s mother’s side. So I decided to trace this Jane’s tree up on Ancestry and see what I could find.

Jane’s great grandfather had come to Canada from Ireland, in the 1800s and his last name, as well as his mother’s maiden name, were ones that I had been seeing in the distant match’s trees on Ancestry. So I decided to see if Jane’s great grandfather had any siblings that had also immigrated to Canada.

I found that he did have a sister named Mary that came over to Canada. She had married a man with the last name that was the rumored last name of Richard’s great grandmother! It was a more uncommon Irish name, so I knew it was definitely something to look into.

I discovered Mary had had two other children with this man in York County before his untimely death in 1889. Richard’s grandmother was born 11 years later, and in 1901, Mary’s older children were living at Bernard Convent in Toronto, without Mary. However, she did reappear later and ended up living into her 80’s.

Based on Richard’s shared DNA with Jane and the census trail, we could confidently assume they were 3rd cousins, and further testing of descendants of Mary’s older two children will hopefully confirm even further that Mary is Richard’s great grandmother.

Richard and Nellie are glad to know more about his great-grandmother and hope to find out more soon.