Merida’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Merida’s biological parents

Merida reached out for help with her search for her biological parents. She knew her last name at birth as well as her the first initial of her birth last name, but that was all the info she had.

I took a look at Merida’s AncestryDNA results and got to work. Her matches split into 5 groups: two on Parent 1’s side, and three on Parent 2’s side. She had one close family match as well, who had no tree, but some information on his profile that proved useful. Merida had not communicated with this match yet. We suspected he was going to be a half sibling or a nephew based on the age in his profile.

I started on Parent 1’s side as the matches were a little better on this side. The common last names for the two match groups were Clark and Bornfield, and I was able to find the union couple that connected the match groups quite quickly. However I knew I was still a generation off as the union couple was going to be Merida’s great grandparents. As well, Merida was about 25% Baltic/German on this parent’s side, so I knew that had to tie in somewhere, as the Clarks/Bornfields were not Baltic/German.

A little more tree surfing pulled up an obituary of one of the Bornfield sons of the union couple. This obituary listed a wife with a very German first and last name, one son, and two daughters. One of the daughters had Merida’s distinct birth name, so I knew that either her or her sister were going to be Merida’s biological mother. In addition, Merida’s close match Timmy was also named in this obituary as a grandson, so now I knew for sure that he was a maternal half sibling of Merida.

My friend and fellow search angel Kelly helped find Timmy on Facebook using the location he had put in his Ancestry profile. On Facebook, we learned that his aunt was the one with Merida’s birth name, so now we knew the name of Merida’s biological mother and had identified her.

With the maternal side sorted out, I went back to Merida’s matches and looked at the paternal match groups. Two were Italian, one was not. I decided to start looking in the tree of the top match in the non-Italian group, related to Merida through the last name Anderson.

I quickly found that this match had an aunt on her Anderson side who had married an Italian man in the city where Merida was born. This couple had four daughters and only one son, which made identifying Merida’s biological father very easy.

Merida was happy with my quick findings and looks forward to learning more about her biological families soon.