Ivy’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Ivy’s biological mother

Ivy is an adoptee who reached out for help finding her biological mother. An AncestryDNA test had matched her with a paternal half sibling, but she was still in search of her maternal side. Ivy knew her own birth name, but had no other information yet on her biological maternal side.

Ivy’s maternal matches split into two groups of matches. Despite both groups being French Canadian, the matches were not great and plentiful like usual, and I was actually unable to find the common last name of either match group, which is rare for me. Most of the matches did not have trees, were not very closely related, or were also adopted.

However, Ivy’s top two maternal matches were decent, both were males and around the first cousin once removed relationship range. One didn’t have a tree, and the other’s tree home person was a woman from the USA.

After some digging, I found that these two matches were full brothers to each other and their parents were from Canada. The tree of the female home person was one of their wives, who may have accidentally attached her own tree to her husband’s DNA. So I started to build their tree out to see what I could find.

I built out the brothers’ pedigrees back three generations and took another look at the trees of their shared matches. They had a shared ancestor with someone who was matching Ivy at 113cm, so I now knew to look at the brothers’ paternal side. Using GenealogieQuebec, I found all of the brothers’ aunts and uncles, and found one aunt that had married a Carbonneau, which was Ivy’s birth last name.

I focused in on this aunt and uncle and found all their kids. Of their five children, four were daughters. We did not have any information about the biological mother such as age (though I was able to find all their ages via marriage records), so I decided to see if I could place any of them in the city that Ivy was born in in the year leading up to her birth.

Ivy’s biological maternal grandfather had died about 8 years after she was born, and I was able to find his obituary which listed one daughter living in the city that Ivy was born. I went through voter’s lists and found that this daughter had first started appearing in voter’s lists the year before Ivy was born! This daughter’s middle name was also Ivy’s birth name.

After some sleuthing on Facebook, I was able to find several of Ivy’s close maternal family members. With the help of a kind and welcoming first cousin, Ivy was able to get in touch with her biological mother within a few weeks. She is very glad to know her biological maternal side and looks forward to connecting with her family.