Martha’s search

*All names has been changed except Sharon and Rod’s.

Search goal: Identify Martha’s biological father.

Martha is another search that came my way thanks to my biological mother Sharon. Her husband Rod’s maternal half aunt is Martha, who was born in 1926 in Australia and has never known the the identity of her biological father. The only things we had to go on was that he was supposedly a tailor, and of course, Martha’s DNA results.

Martha had done an AncestryDNA test over 4 years ago with her son but they had been unable to access their shared account until this month. When Rod got his AncestryDNA results back in 2020, we were able to compare their ethnicities and could see that Martha was 50% Jewish which was on her paternal side, and this was very intriguing.

When I first took a look at Martha’s matches I was excited to see she had decent paternal matches. However they didn’t split into two groups, and at first I was not sure if this was due to endogamy, only having matches from one of Martha’s paternal lines, or if the close matches were all descended below Martha’s paternal grandparents, which was a good possibility due to Martha’s age and her biological father’s estimated age range.

Martha’s top paternal match Rebecca was just over 500cm and with a bit of sleuthing I was able to figure out her pedigree. After about an hour of working on the paternal matches, I was able to connect 3 of Martha’s top 4 paternal matches to a common ancestor couple with the last name Barinsky that had immigrated from Poland to Australia in the early 1880s.

Based on Martha’s shared DNA to Rebecca and the handful of other paternal matches, I could tell that Martha’s biological father was going to be a child of the Barinsky couple. They had many children, including three sons. One son had died several decades before Martha was born, so he was an automatic rule out.

There didn’t seem to be any matches descended from the two potential sons, so next I looked at locations to see if that would help determine which one was more likely to be Martha’s biological father. One of the sons lived in Sydney- and the other son, Hyman, lived in the small town five hours away that Martha’s mother was from. Not only that, he was a tailor!

Some more research into Hyman’s life revealed he had a wife that had died a few years before Martha had been born. They had no children together, so Martha had no paternal half siblings (that we know of, at least).

After 98 years, Martha’s mystery was solved, and she was very happy to learn the identity of her biological father. Rebecca was also able to share some pictures of Hyman’s siblings and mother which Martha and her family enjoyed seeing and were thankful to receive. She hopes that we will be able to find a photo of Hyman in the near future.