Kerry’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Kerry’s maternal grandfather

Kerry reached out earlier this year for help identifying her maternal grandfather. Her mother had never known who her father was, and Kerry decided to see if AncestryDNA could help with their family’s mystery.

Kerry knew her maternal grandmother’s side, so I started by labelling those matches and that left me with the matches from Kerry’s maternal grandfather side.

The maternal grandfather side matches split into two groups: The Johnston group, and the Salisbury group.

I could see that the Johnston group had fairly recent English ancestry and had come to the city where Kerry’s mother had been born. The Salisbury group had been in Canada for a few generations already, but moved from another county in Ontario to the one where the Johnston family lived.

Kerry’s top match from her maternal grandfather’s side was a man whose grandparents I figured were the union couple between the Johnston and the Salisbury families. However, this man did not have any Johnston matches like he should have, based on his tree, as Jack Johnson was his maternal grandfather. I realized he may have an NPE, and started to look at his mother’s siblings to see who could potentially be Kerry’s maternal grandfather.

The Johnston+Salisbury union couple had four daughters and one son. That son, Jacob, was the right age and in the right place to be Kerry’s biological maternal grandfather. The resemblance to Kerry and her mother was also uncanny.

Though Jacob Johnston had married, he never had any other children. Despite uncovering an NPE in the family, DNA prevailed, and Kerry and her mother are glad to have