Miriam’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goals: 1: Identify Miriam’s biological father. 2: Identify Miriam’s paternal great grandparents.

Part 1

Miriam is an adoptee who reached out for help last year with finding her biological father. She had found her maternal side already, but needed help with the paternal side.

I started off by taking a look at Miriam’s AncestryDNA matches. Thankfully, her biological mother had also done an AncestryDNA test, which helped somewhat to split matches, but since Miriam was 75% Jewish, there were many “both sides” matches. Miriam’s biological mother was 100% Jewish, which meant that Miriam likely had one paternal grandparent that was also 100% Jewish, and the other paternal grandparent was a 100% Norwegian/Northwestern European mix.

On Ancestry, I managed to sort Miriam’s paternal matches into four groups: two were Jewish match groups, one was the Norwegian match group, and one was a Scottish match group.

I wasn’t able to find the common last names of the Jewish match groups due to there being more distant matches in these groups. I started with the Norwegian group and found the common ancestors to be a couple that had come from Norway to the prairies in Canada and had many children. The Scottish match group I also found common ancestors for, and they came to the United States and then to western Canada as well. Though I searched thoroughly, I was unable to find any connection between the groups.

I helped Miriam upload her DNA to all the sites that took uploads (Gedmatch, MyHeritage, and FamilyTreeDNA) in hopes there would be additional, different matches on the sites. While we waited, I looked at Miriam’s 23andMe results to explore her chromosome browser.

The chromosome browser proved to be very insightful. Miriam only had one X chromosome that was Jewish- the other X chromosome was completely Norwegian/Northwestern European. Since we knew Miriam’s biological mother was Jewish, this meant that Miriam’s paternal grandmother was the Norwegian/Northwestern European grandparent, and that her paternal grandfather was Jewish.

MyHeritage turned out to be the site of success, and on there, Miriam had a match that was a second cousin to her top paternal Jewish match on Ancestry. I was now able to build out a tree for this match group, as I was able to find the common ancestor couple, which was a couple named Bernard and Rebecca Bernstein that had come from Poland to Canada. From the centimorgans of these two matches, I figured Miriam was likely their second cousin once removed, and her biological father was going to be their second cousin.

Bernard and Rebecca had four children. Since the two suspected 2C1R matches were descended from two of them, I looked at the other two children and started building out their trees. I knew I was looking for a Jewish man who had had a son with a non-Jewish woman. Given the time frame I expected this union to be in (1960s) I knew this would be on the unusual side.

I first looked at Bernard and Rebecca’s only daughter Tova and saw that she had married a Jewish man and had two daughters, and one son, who himself had never married or had children.

I then looked at Bernard and Rebecca’s son Simon, and Simon had married a Jewish woman and had three sons. Two of these sons had married and had sons of their own, but they all seemed to have married Jewish women.

I was stumped. But not for long.

I built out the trees extensively of the Bernstein men’s spouses, hoping to find some Northwestern European connection somewhere. And then- I found something.

Simon’s son Martin had a wife Sarah, who was an only child. I found Sarah’s parent’s FindAGrave entries, which had been created by their only granddaughter. The obituaries written by the granddaughter noted that Sarah was the adopted daughter of her parents! I knew we were on to something here.

Martin and Sarah had two sons in addition to their daughter. On Facebook I found the age of the younger son, who was much too young to be Miriam’s biological father. However, the other son, Maurice, was very close to the age of Miriam’s biological mother.

Miriam composed a letter to send Maurice and within a few days, he replied, confirming he had known her biological mother and the timeline lined up. They met a few weeks later, and he did an AncestryDNA test as well, which positively confirmed our findings! Maurice and Miriam have been in a positive, happy reunion since.

Part 2

Maurice was quick to confirm that his mother Sarah had been adopted into a Jewish family but was not ethnically Jewish. Though he didn’t have many details, he did know she had been born in Saskatchewan, and now we knew her birthdate as well. It was time to revisit the Norwegian and Scottish match groups that now I knew why they weren’t connecting anywhere.

Since the Norwegian family had lived in Saskatchewan, I had a feeling that this would be Sarah’s maternal side. Looking at the common ancestor couple, I noticed that all three of their daughters had married three brothers from a French family. Upon closer investigation of these brothers, I found that Miriam also had distinct, more distant matches coming from the French family as well. This meant one of Sarah’s biological parents was a child of one of the French/Norwegian couples.

Two of these couples had descendants that were matches, and the third couple did not. The third couple only had one daughter and one son. The daughter I suspected was the biological mother as she had gotten married within a few years after Sarah was born.

Next, I revisited the Scottish match group, which had really stumped me in the beginning. The common ancestor’s last name was Clark, and Miriam’s top DNA match in this group, Lisa, was descended from a daughter of the couple who had also married a Clark. I took a deeper look at this Clark-Clark union and discovered they were completely different families from Canada and the United States, and that Miriam had distinct matches to both Clark families.

Similarly to the Norwegian/French family, I narrowed Sarah’s other biological parent down to a small Clark sibling set- one son, one daughter. Lisa was a granddaughter of the daughter, so we theorized that the son was Sarah’s biological father, which fit with the centimorgans shared between Lisa and Miriam. It also made sense with our theory that Sarah’s biological mother was from the Norwegian/French side.

Both Miriam and Maurice are very happy to have learned more about their biological families.