Robert’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Robert’s biological mother

Robert is an adoptee who reached out for help with finding his biological mother. He had done an AncestryDNA test and matched with two paternal half siblings, but they were also searching for their biological father, so Robert’s biological father (who as an aside, was also adopted) wasn’t able to help with the search. Robert was in the process of waiting for additional adoption information to be returned to him. In the meantime, I offered to look at his DNA results and see what we could find.

Robert’s maternal matches were rather low, with the closest one being 204cm. I sorted the maternal matches into three groups:

• The first group was England based, and I was unable to find the common last name of this match group.
• The second match group was Irish and connected by the last name Quaid.
• The third match group was Welsh and I thought the common last name connecting the matches was Williams, but this is a very common last name, particularly in Wales, so I wasn’t sure.

I could tell based on all the matches that Robert’s biological mother was going to have very recent heritage from the United Kingdom, possibly even being born there. I decided to start by looking at the Quaid match group since that one I at least found the common last name for.

The closest Quaid match didn’t have a useable tree, so I kept going and took a look at the second closest match, Theresa, which was not very close at all, at 91cm. However, Theresa had a great grandmother named Louisa Quaid that had come to Canada from Ireland and lived in a city not far from where Robert had been born.

Intrigued, I built out this tree of Louisa Quad and found that she had three children that lived to adulthood. Of the three children, Theresa was the grandchild of one of Louisa’s two sons. Louisa’s daughter had married a French Canadian man, so I figured I didn’t need to look at that line as there were no French Canadian maternal matches. Lastly, Louisa’s other son James had married a woman born in Wales.

I found James’ obituary that was published the year before Robert had been born. The obituary listed four daughters, two of which were living in the town Robert had been born in.

I also looked at James’ wife’s line and was able to tie a 22cm match into her side of the tree, which added to my theory that one of James’ daughters was Robert’s biological mother.

One of James’ daughters had passed away about 20 years ago, and she had a few long obituaries and articles published about her and her family since she was well known in her field of work, and these listed all the birth and wedding years of herself and her siblings. It also even revealed that the youngest daughter had been adopted into the family, meaning there was one daughter that could automatically be ruled out as Robert’s biological mother.

The two older daughters had been married prior to Robert’s birth, leaving just the third born sister as a possibility.

At this point, Robert remembered that he had a little bit of non-identifying information about his biological mother and her family. He found it and it lined up completely with the family I had found- including ages of everyone, siblings, heritage, and the bio mom’s own father dying the year before.

I found one of Robert’s aunts on social media and he reached out, and it was confirmed our findings were correct. Robert was very pleased with my quick findings and happy to have found his biological maternal family.