Nathan’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Nathan’s biological parents.

I met Nathan in a very unusual way- my biological mother was on a New Zealand cruise and made friends with a lady named Lisa from her hometown. Lisa happened to have done an AncestryDNA test, and had a top match that was a mystery- neither of them knew how they were related. My bio mom put Lisa in touch with me, who then gave her mystery match, Nathan, my email address.

I first looked at Lisa’s matches but wasn’t able to determine the relationship beyond that Nathan was on Lisa’s paternal side. They were matching in the usual first cousin once removed range.

When I started emailing with Nathan, that’s when he mentioned he was adopted, and he invited me to his AncestryDNA results to see what could be found.

Nathan’s matches were still showing as Parent 1 and Parent 2, and I was not sure which side was which as I had no information from Nathan yet. He had mentioned he knew his biological mother’s name, but had not sent her name.

I started on the Parent 1 side that Lisa was on, as the matches were slightly better on this side. I knew they were related via an Italian family, the Toscano family. Nathan’s other parent 1 match group was Scottish and connected by the last name McKinley.

Pretty quickly I found that Lisa had an aunt that married a McKinley, and they had two sons that were in the right age range to be the biological father of Nathan. The older son was married and living in another province at the time Nathan was born, so we theorized Nathan’s biological father was probably the younger son.

With the parent sides now assigned, I took a look at Nathan’s maternal side and got to work. The matches were very low, with the highest one being 133cm. The maternal matches split into three groups- one connected by the last name Knox, another connected by the last name Peters, and the last group was an English one that I was unable to find the common last name for.

The Knox and Peters families were from Ontario but I was able to find the union couple between the families pretty quickly and they had come out west. The union couple had had three daughters, which between them, had four daughters, and I knew one of those four daughters was going to be the biological mother of Nathan. I was struggling to figure out which one of the four girls could be, as the English match group, that was presumably Nathan’s maternal grandfather side, was not connecting to the spouses of any of the Knox/Peters daughters.

However, right when I was hitting this wall, Nathan emailed me with his biological mother’s name, which was indeed the name of one of the four first cousins I had been looking at!

With her name, I was able to find his half siblings on Facebook easily. Nathan reached out to them and was received very warmly by his maternal half siblings and biological mother. After contact was established it was also confirmed that the younger McKinley brother was Nathan’s biological father and had known about him as well. They all look forward to meeting each other very soon.