Victoria’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Victoria’s biological father.

Victoria is a friend of someone else I had helped recently, and Victoria had reached out for help with her own search for her biological father. Victoria was adopted and knew who her biological mother was, but unfortunately she had passed away before they got to meet. The only information Victoria had was that her biological father had been in the Navy.

I took a look at Victoria’s AncestryDNA matches and got started. Initially when I sorted the matches into groups, I had inadvertently clumped most of the matches together, as I later found out that Victoria’s top paternal match was a first cousin once removed that was a generation younger than her her, and was therefore matching most of Victoria’s matches.

The first match group I identified was the Doyle group from Ontario. There were two matches that had an MRCA in the mid 1800s- a bit more distant than usual. I didn’t feel like downtreeing from that MRCA yet, so I continued to look at Victoria’s matches.

I quickly found a second MRCA between two matches that was from the late 1800s. This MRCA was actually just one lady (we’ll call her Jenny), not a couple, as Jenny had been married twice, had children with each husband, and these two matches were descended Jenny and each respective husband.

I recalled seeing a lot of the Davidson last name in Victoria’s matches, but hadn’t been able to find an MRCA due to the matches all being from Scotland. I went back and looked, and realized that Victoria had a third match group that was related via the Davidson line. Jenny and both her husbands were born in Scotland, so this made sense.

I figured the Davidson and Doyle families were going to be a union couple, so I started scanning through trees trying to find a connection and sure enough, I found a granddaughter of the Doyle MRCA that had married one of Jenny’s Davidson sons.

This union produced three sons. Two were not old enough to be Victoria’s biological father, but the oldest one was, and he was within a year of Victoria’s biological mother’s age. I quickly discovered he was in the Navy and moved to the city Victoria’s biological mother was raised in, only 4 years before Victoria was born!

After identifying him and building out his family tree some more, I realized Victoria’s top paternal match was a first cousin once removed. She had no tree, but her unique name combined with obituaries and Facebook helped place her into the tree, now that we knew her mother was a first cousin of Victoria’s.

Unfortunately, Victoria’s biological father had passed away several years ago, but she hopes to connect with her newfound paternal half siblings and other relatives in the near future.