Norma’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Norma’s biological father.

Lena, who was a distant cousin of Carmen and had helped with her search, reached out to me for help with her half aunt Norma’s search. Norma was not adopted, but had never known her biological father. Lena is a genealogist herself, but was having trouble putting the pieces together, so she reached out hoping the two of us could put our heads together and solve Norma’s search. She had a possible first name for Norma’s biological father- Robert.

Lena had identified many matches from the Schofield family and built a floating branch within her own tree trying to figure this out. The matches were all over the place with how they matched Norma. We were able to identify a common ancestral couple back in the 1800s, but there were many double relations that seemed to be complicating things.

I looked at Norma’s paternal matches and found that while most of her matches were from the Schofield family, she also had a smaller match group that seemed England based that were connected by the last name Barker.

Norma’s closest match was part of both match groups, but he had no tree and we were unable to find his connection to either family.

I built out the Barker family and found the most recent common ancestors, and worked back down, trying to find someone who had come to Canada. Eventually, I found that only Martha (whose mother was a Barker) had come to Canada, to the small town that the Schofields were all from, and had two sons and a daughter- and one son was named Robert.

Norma did not have any DNA matches from Martha’s husband’s side. I started to think perhaps Robert had an NPE of his own and his own biological father was from the Schofield family.

Lena rearranged the tree to see how Norma’s Thrulines would look with this theory in place. This turned out to be an excellent idea, as it now showed how Norma was connected to Kara. Kara was the second closest match in the Barker match group, but we had not found anything about her because everyone in her tree was marked as living and she had a common name.

Thrulines revealed that Kara’s grandmother was Robert’s sister. Kara was matching Norma right in the half first cousin once removed range, so we knew that our theory was very likely to be correct. We were even able to find which Schofield was very likely to be Robert’s biological father due to Norma’s closest Schofield matches descended from this man.

Lena was very happy to provide her aunt with some answers and a paternal family tree.