Jane’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Jane’s paternal grandfather.

Jane reached out for help identifying her paternal grandfather. Her father Harold was an adoptee and Jane had already found and connected with her paternal grandmother’s side, but her paternal grandfather side was proving a little more challenging. Her family was eager to solve the other half of the 90 year old mystery.

Jane had done an AncestryDNA test and had identified some of the matches coming from her paternal grandfather’s side. She wasn’t sure exactly how she was connected to them, but knew it was a large family connected by the last name McIntosh.

I took a look and agreed that she had found the McIntosh common ancestor couple. They were born in the 1830s, so we were going quite a ways back. I figured we were likely looking for a grandchild of the McIntosh couple, born around the turn of the century.

My next step was to look at all the children of the McIntosh couple. Of the 7 children, three had descendants that had tested, and these matches were not close enough to Jane for her to be descended from any of those branches.

I started to look at the spouses of the other four McIntosh children, to see if Jane had matches from their side. I found that one of the McIntosh daughters, Sadie, had married a man named Gerald Morton, and Jane had matches coming from both of Gerald’s parent’s sides.

Sadie and Gerald had had two sons and one daughter. The sons were 2 years older and 7 years younger than Jane’s paternal grandmother, so a similar age, and were born in the same town as Harold.

Both sons married before Harold was born, however one had no children and the other had only one son, who had no children of his own.

With both potential fathers both being deceased and having no living descendants to test, there was no way to be absolutely sure who Jane’s paternal grandfather was. However, the younger brother had permanently moved to the USA about a decade before Jane’s father was born.

Jane and I agreed it was more likely to be the older Morton brother who was closer in age to Jane’s grandmother and living in the same town as her. Jane is glad to have her paternal grandfather’s identity confirmed as much as it can be with DNA.