Susan’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Find Susan’s biological parents

Susan’s search was one that took about eight months and many people helped us out with her search. This is a longer read, so get comfy.

Susan was born in BC and had done an AncestryDNA test, a 23andMe test, and had uploaded to Gedmatch. She had some non-identifying information about her biological parents, including that her biological mother was from Alberta. Susan also had a very close match on Ancestry- in the uncle/half brother/nephew range. However, this match had a very common name- we’ll call him Rick Smith- and Rick had no tree, no profile information, and had not logged in to read Susan’s messages. So despite being a great match, he was still very much a mystery.

I started by looking at AncestryDNA and sorted Susan’s matches into six groups- three on one parent’s side, three on the other. The match groups on Parent 1 side were all from England. Parent 2 side were from Ontario. I started working on the Parent 2 side first, as there were easier records, and soon connected the groups and had Susan’s Parent 2 narrowed down to a set of siblings in the Clark family- two boys and a girl. However, we still didn’t know which side was which.

I decided to set Parent 2 down and look at Parent 1, which was the side that Rick Smith was on. I found the most recent common ancestors of the Smith family, that Susan’s closest matches were from. It was a couple from England. Susan’s closest matches were some of their grandkids and great grandkids.

I encouraged Susan to reach out to a presumed second cousin on Ancestry named Sarah. Sarah was happy to help and said that her mother’s uncle Theodore Smith, his wife and kids had moved to Canada in the 1940s. However, the family hadn’t heard from them since.

With the help of a genealogy group on Facebook, I was able to find passenger ship records for Theodore and his young family, that included two daughters and a son. The son’s name was Rick Smith! We reasoned that Susan’s match Rick was possibly Rick Smith or a son of Rick- a Rick Smith Jr, perhaps. We also reasoned that Susan’s Parent 1 was one of the two daughters or the son, but still did not know which side was which.

The passenger ship records did not say where exactly the Smith family was moving to. However, I figured they may have moved to the city that the Parent 2 family was from. After looking through voters lists and city directories, I was able to confirm that the Smith family had moved there, and were in fact living about 2km away from the Clark family.

After I discovered this, it was very hard to find additional information. Time went by and all I could find was that the Clarks and Smiths had gone to the same high school.

I also still didn’t know which side was which. Susan had X DNA matches from her Clark grandmother’s side, as well as a half-niece on 23andMe from the Smith side (who had an NPE of her own, and was not sure how she was related to Susan).

We asked Sarah if she would upload to Gedmatch to see if her and Susan would be an X match. Sarah’s grandmother and Susan’s grandfather Theodore Smith were siblings. If Sarah and Susan were an X match, we’d know the Smiths were Susan’s maternal side, as Susan would not get X DNA if Rick Smith Sr was her father (we were thinking Susan’s match Rick Smith could be a Jr of a Sr). If Sarah and Susan weren’t an X match, we’d know they were paternal and that Rick Smith would have to be Susan’s biological father.

Sarah agreed to upload to Gedmatch, and a day later, the results came back- Susan and Sarah shared X DNA. One of the Smith daughters was Susan’s biological mother. Susan’s mystery match Rick Smith was very likely to be her uncle.

Around this time, I also got lucky with a Google search of Rick Smith and his high school’s name which I had found from the Classmates site. This pulled up a Facebook profile of a Rick Smith living in BC and some happy birthday wishes confirmed his age and that he was the right guy. There seemed to be no references to other family members besides his daughter. Susan sent Rick a message on Facebook as well, but like Ancestry, it went unread. She sent one to his daughter, and it too went unread.

Rick’s daughter had thousands of friends in a certain east coast province, and I decided to ask my fellow genealogist friend if she had any mutual friends with the daughter. Indeed she did, and their one mutual was her own family member- so she got her cousin to send Rick’s daughter a message asking him to please check his Ancestry messages.

The message was finally received, and a week or two later, Susan heard from Rick on Ancestry. She shared the few details that she had, and Rick confirmed that him and his younger sister Isabel were living in Alberta the year Susan was born. Additional information Susan had also matched the younger sister’s interests.

However, Rick had not been in contact with his sister in many many decades. He did not know her whereabouts or if she was still alive.

Frustrated, we both felt like we had hit another dead end. I wasn’t sure what to do next. The Clark brothers had also not read their messages from Susan on Facebook.

However, a week later, a different genealogist friend of mine came across a tree on MyHeritage that had Rick’s grandparents in it. The home person of the tree seemed fairly closely related to them, but descendants in the tree were all private. Using other names in the tree, I found this lady- Carrie- on Ancestry, but she had turned messaging off! My friend found her on Facebook, and I decided to message her there.

Carrie was thankfully very nice and willing to help. It turned out that her stepmother was Isabel’s younger sister Annie. However, Annie had passed away less than a year ago, and Carrie was not in touch with Isabel. She suggested we reach out to one of Annie’s daughters who would probably have contact information for Isabel.

We found Annie’s daughter on Facebook and Susan sent her a message. They started chatting later that day, and Annie’s daughter called her aunt Isabel. A day or two later, Susan and Isabel finally talked on the phone, and Isabel confirmed she was Susan’s biological mother. Susan was very glad to finally have her maternal side confirmed and chat to some of her newfound relatives.

Though only further DNA testing could confirm absolutely which Clark brother is Susan’s biological father, Isabel did mention she knew the older brother. At long last, Susan’s search was (mostly) complete.