Gavin’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Find Gavin’s biological father

Gavin is an adoptee that reached out for some help finding his biological father. Our mutual friend had helped him identify his biological mother, and additional Ancestry tests were pending to confirm that further. In the meantime, Gavin wanted to find his biological father, without making contact yet with his maternal side.

Since Gavin had a close family type match on his maternal side, his AncestryDNA matches split easily and I was able to identify two main paternal groups. They were both fairly small and I could tell both had recent heritage from a few countries in the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, I was able to find the common last name of one of the match groups.

Gavin had some non-identifying information about his biological father, which we hoped was correct. I looked that over and started building a research tree using the highest paternal match that had a tree, which was a match that was likely going to be a first cousin once removed to Gavin.

I could tell this match was going to be related to Gavin through his father’s side based on the common last name of the match group, McGarrity. I found his father’s obituary which listed a few siblings, including one in the province where Gavin was born.

I pivoted to that McGarrity sibling and found that she had had two sons and moved to the same town that Gavin’s biological mother lived in. The McGarrity sons had even gone to the same high school as Gavin. The non-identifying information was completely a match to this family, so we knew that Gavin’s biological father was the older McGarrity son (the younger one would have been too young to be a possible parent as well).

Gavin eventually met his biological father (who remembered Gavin’s biological mother) who was pleasantly surprised to hear he had another child. Gavin looks forward to making more connections on both sides of his bio families.