Brianna’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Find Brianna’s biological paternal grandparents

Brianna is a child of an adoptee who reached out for help with finding her dad’s biological parents. She had his birth name (Daniel Hanson), birthdate and had done an AncestryDNA test, but had found she was not matched to anyone with the Hanson last name.

I took a look at Brianna’s Ancestry results and divided her paternal matches into four groups, each representing one of her dad’s grandparent lines. I quickly found the common last name for three of the match groups. The last match group was very small, with more distant matches besides a closer one that didn’t have a tree, and looked to have recent English ancestry, and I was unable to find the last name of this match group.

None of the match groups had the last name Hanson, which made me agree with Brianna that there was likely no DNA connection to the Hanson last name. However, I started to get to work on two of the match groups and building out the trees. They had rather unique last names, which helped find the marriage that linked the two groups together. This couple only had one son, who was also named Daniel, and was the right age to be Brianna’s paternal grandfather. Figuring this side was complete, I started to tackle the other match group.

I could tell this group was related by the last name Prefontaine and was French, so I looked at the first match in the group that had a useable tree. Though she was only 160cm, she also only had one French line, which was the Prefontaine family. I traced her tree up and found the obituary of her grandfather, which was a gold mine- it mentioned a sister Clara that was married to a Hanson living where Brianna’s father was born!

With this information, I found the obituary of Clara’s son, whose first name was Brianna’s dad’s birth middle name. It was clear he had been named after his bio dad and uncle. Clara had two daughters, and we figured one of the daughters was Brianna’s paternal grandmother. With the tree filled out, we also now realized that one of the closer Prefontaine matches was a half first cousin of Brianna’s dad- she was matching too low to be a full first cousin, and did not match the English group that was Brianna’s dad’s maternal grandfather’s line. Someone had a Hanson parent, and someone did not!