Melvin’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Melvin’s biological parents

Melvin’s wife Rina reached out to me for help with his search. Melvin was in search of his biological family- he didn’t have any of his adoption information, but he had done an AncestryDNA test, so I was invited to his matches as a collaborator and got started.

Melvin’s matches sorted into six groups:

-2 French groups on Parent 1 side

-2 Italian groups on Parent 2 side

-2 Scottish groups on Parent 2 side

I was able to find the common last name of all the match groups except for one of the Italian groups.

All the match groups were all based in Northern Ontario for the last four generations or so, though some members of the Parent 1 side had made their way down to the Golden Horseshoe area where Melvin had been born.

I started looking at Parent 1 due to this, and used one of Melvin’s closer matches to start a research tree. I figured this match would be a first cousin once removed, so I started building out the tree of the first French group. I used GenealogieQuebec to search for marriages and quickly found a marriage to someone descended from the most recent common ancestors (MRCA) of the second French group. Melvin had a second cousin type match from the second French group, so I knew I was on the right track. This couple had seven children and Melvin’s Parent 1 was going to be one of the seven.

I moved on to Parent 2 and randomly decided to look at the tree of a match from one of the Scottish groups. I thought the match might be a second cousin once removed type of match based on their shared cm with Melvin, so I started browsing trees and looking at their grandparent’s siblings. Sure enough, I found a great uncle that had married someone from the other Scottish group. Luckily all the names in this search were unique and there was no overlap between any of the match groups!

I looked at the Scottish couple, who I figured would be a set of Melvin’s great grandparents. They had a few sons, and while searching and finding obituaries, I found one son whose obituary mentioned he was the son-in-law of an Italian couple.. and his mother-in-law had the last name of one of the Italian groups.

Knowing the Scottish/Italian couple was going to be Melvin’s grandparents, I found their children, and there were only two possibilities to be Melvin’s Parent 2.

I sent my findings to Rina, who did some sleuthing of her own and found that one of the seven from the French sibling set was Facebook friends with one of the Parent 2 possibilities. Rina reached out to a potential close relative of Melvin, who confirmed our findings, and this search -which only took two hours from start to finish- concluded positively.