Vanessa’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Vanessa’s maternal great grandparents

Vanessa reached out for help earlier this year with her search. Her maternal grandfather, Walter, had been born in 1912 and later adopted. She did have his paperwork, which amazingly listed full names of both of Walter’s biological parents. Vanessa was seeing some connections to both of the last names given, but wanted me to check her progress so far and confirm the findings as much as I could.

The names for Walter’s biological parents were Walter Hartley and Ellie MacCallum. Since Vanessa’s mother Brenda had done an AncestryDNA test, I opted to look at her matches since she was a generation closer to Walter.

Brenda’s Hartley match group had closer matches, so without looking at the tree Vanessa had done, I built out a research tree for the Hartleys and indeed found a Walter Hartley who would have been in the right area at the right time. I shared this with Vanessa and she agreed that was the Walter Hartley she had found and concluded was Walter’s biological father.

I made a spreadsheet of all the other paternal matches Brenda had, and grouped them based on who matched who, and came up with two distinct groups.

The first group was indeed the MacCallum group that Vanessa had mentioned. I looked through the matches’ trees and found the common ancestors I figured Walter was descended from.

The second group I initially thought was another MacCallum group as I saw that name in a few trees. But I remembered the match groups were distinct, and I noticed this group was also based in Pontiac, which was not too far from the town in Ontario where Walter was born.
I thought the last name Crawford was looking potentially relevant, so I started to look for a marriage between someone from the MacCallum family and someone from the Crawford family.

After some searching, I finally found it, and found an Eliza MacCallum that tied the two families together. I realized that Ellie was probably a nickname for Eliza. Eliza was the same age as Walter Hartley and living in the same town.

As I researched Eliza, I found that that she had had a son named George MacCallum exactly a year before Walter was born. I noticed right away that George had his mother’s last name, and no father was listed on the birth registration, which was not unusual in the time period if the mother was unmarried.

Given the DNA lining up to Eliza’s family, and knowing she was not yet married with a young son when a second son was born, Vanessa and I agreed that Eliza MacCallum was her grandpa Walter’s biological mother. Vanessa was very happy to have confirmed the answers to a 111 year old family mystery.