Miranda’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Miranda’s biological father

Miranda is an adoptee who reached out for help with her paternal side. She had found and been in contact with her biological maternal relatives, but did not have any information to go on for her paternal side.

Miranda added me as a collaborator to her AncestryDNA results and I took a look. Her paternal matches split into three groups-

• The Marchand group, which were French
• The Jenkins group, Ontario based with roots in Ireland
• The Goodwin group, Ontario based with roots in England

Miranda’s top paternal match was 309cm, which is a decent match, but with no tree and no information to go on, I had to go a ways down the match list to find useable trees. The top paternal match with a useable tree was at 121cm. Several matches between the 121cm match and the 309cm match had unusable trees or were adopted.

Nevertheless I built out the trees of the distant Jenkins and Goodwin matches, and found the most recent common ancestors for both groups- couples born way back in the 1870s.

Surprisingly the downtreeing was quick and I was able to find the union couple between the Jenkins and Goodwin groups rather fast. The union couple only had two children. I looked at the marriage record of the younger daughter, and saw that her mother in law’s maiden name was Marchand! I knew I had found the union couple connecting the Marchand groups with the Jenkins/Goodwin couple’s child.

The Marchand/Goodwin union couple had had many daughters but only two sons, and I knew one had to be Miranda’s biological father. One seemed more likely than the other based on where he was living, and where Miranda’s maternal side was from.

Miranda reached out to a few relatives and eventually heard back from one of the Marchand son’s daughters. She agreed to do an AncestryDNA test and came back as a first cousin match to Miranda, confirming that our theory of which Marchand brother was Miranda’s biological father was correct. Miranda is glad to have her paternal side confirmed and has already made some close connections with her newfound family members.