Valerie’s search

*All names have been changed, except names of deceased persons on the Bourrice family line. See Missing No More: Rene Bourrice’s Reappearance- from legal death in British Columbia to second life in Quebec for more info.

Search goals:

• Identify Valerie’s biological parents (primary search goal)
• Identify Sara’s biological father (secondary search goal)
• Find what happened to Sara’s maternal grandfather (secondary search goal)

I have been very hopeful for the last nearly three years that I would be able to write Valerie’s search, and now the time has come. After three years and multiple family mysteries uncovered, including the true identity of Valerie’s great grandfather, it is finally time to write up how I solved them all.

2021- The search begins for Valerie’s biological parents

Valerie is an adoptee from BC who reached out for help finding her biological parents in fall 2021. She had her original birth registration which listed her biological mother’s name (Sara Rhodes), age, and address at the time of Valerie’s birth. Valerie had also taken an AncestryDNA test.

When I started helping Valerie, AncestryDNA did not yet split matches into Parent 1 and Parent 2 sides. All of Valerie’s matches were under 300cm. Using the Leeds method I split Valerie’s matches into six groups:

• Group 1: The Baines group, Michigan and Ontario based, with closer matches coming from a couple that had moved to Alberta
• Group 2: The Ronson group, Missouri/Kentucky based, again with some matches living in Alberta
• Group 3: A few common names for this group, they seemed to be London Ontario based
• Group 4: French Canadian from Quebec
• Group 5: A different French Canadian group from Quebec
• Group 6: The Covey group, also London Ontario based, many matches also were part of group 3.

I began with my usual match building and making the research tree. I was able to find common ancestors for all the groups except the French ones, but I was unable to connect any of the match groups to each other. Additionally, the Rhodes last name was not showing up anywhere in any matches’ trees. I was puzzled.

After a few weeks of tree building and unsuccessfully connecting matches, I switched gears and decided to look for Sara using local newspapers. I found who I thought were her parents fairly easily, but there were no DNA connections coming from either of them. I started to suspect there was an adoption or NPE up the line- possibly more than one.

Along with finding the obituaries of Sara’s parents I also found her three brothers, all of who were also deceased and had no children. With Valerie’s permission I reached out to a few of Sara’s first cousins on Ancestry. I quickly heard back from one of them, and she did know of Sara and mentioned Sara had been adopted into the Rhodes family. Unfortunately, she had not been in touch with Sara since she was a teenager and did not know of her whereabouts. More roadblocks! But, now we knew why some of the match groups were not coming together easily.

Meanwhile, Valerie reached out to one of Sara’s brother’s widowed wives, Marjorie, who was very responsive and happy to help. She remembered Sara had had a baby young, but likewise did not know of Sara’s current whereabouts. Valerie and Marjorie had a nice meetup and Valerie received some photos of Sara and her adoptive family. I was starting to run out of ideas of how to find Sara using traditional genealogy or genetic genealogy methods.

A few weeks went by and 2022 began. I thought to search Sara Rhodes in BC’s court records to see if we could find her that way- we’d have to get lucky and hope she had not changed her name.

I got a few results that looked like they could be her. Thankfully her spelling of her name was distinct, so I decided to buy the files for a 2016 civil court case from the lower mainland. The files listed Sara’s address at the time of the case, which was from six years prior. Could she still be living there? We wondered.

I sent my findings to Valerie, who decided to go with a friend and see if Sara was living at her 2016 address. And.. she was.

2022- Meeting Sara, Sara’s own search, and Ancestry’s match splitting debut

Valerie drove to her house two days after I bought the court info, knocked on the door, and met her biological mother, Sara. They had a very good first meeting and reunion visit!

Sara had all of her own adoption information- including her own original birth registration and non-identifying information. She gave this all to Valerie, who then sent it to me.

From this, I could now see that Sara’s maternal grandmother’s line was the Ronson group. Sara’s maternal grandfather’s side was French Canadian and was presumably where the Quebec based matches were coming from. Sara’s maternal grandfather had disappeared in 1939 and had been declared legally dead in 1945. Sara’s paternal side was unknown but she did have some non-identifying information about her own biological father. Sara had no information about who Valerie’s biological father could be.

With these additional mysteries to uncover, I went back to Valerie’s matchlist, but could not make any progress on any of the unknown sides or lines.

In summer 2022, the AncestryDNA match splitting feature was released, which helped further many of my searches that had been a bit challenging. With this feature we now could see that match groups 1, 4 and 5 (the Baines group and the Quebec based groups) were all from Valerie’s maternal side. Groups 3 and 6 (the London Ontario groups) were Valerie’s paternal side.

Sadly Sara passed away at the end of 2022, just 11 months after her and Valerie reunited. I promised I would not give up and still try to find answers for Valerie and Sara.

I checked Valerie’s matches on AncestryDNA (and the other sites she had uploaded to) weekly hoping for new matches, and a few did pop up here and there, but none above 200cm. I worked on the research tree and built out branches and felt like I wasn’t making any progress.

However in 2024 I did make immense progress and finally completed Sara’s unknown lines. In her non-identifying information, it described her biological father as a man of German descent, born in 1921, who was an auto mechanic along with his brother who was older than him by 5 years. The brothers were both from Alberta, and their father had a farm. I figured that the connection was going to be through the Baines group, but there was just no family that seemed to fit. I had identified the Baines most recent common ancestors, but all their children had very large families of their own, none with just two children.

Eventually I realized that like many of my past searches, Sara’s biological mother was likely the one providing the information about the biological father, and may have missed some family details, though not on purpose- she just didn’t know anything further than what she had provided.

With this in mind I revisited the Baines family and found a Baines daughter of the MRCA (most recent common ancestors) that had married a German man who was a farmer and had many children with him. Two of their sons, born 1916 and 1921, had moved to British Columbia and worked as auto mechanics. It felt like the answers for this one had been in front of me the whole time! Sara’s biological father, who had died in the 1980s, had never married and had no other children (that we know of).

I also solved the disappearance of Sara’s maternal grandfather and connected Valerie to her French matches. That is a whole story of its own, so feel free to read it here: Missing No More: Rene Bourrice’s Reappearance- from legal death in British Columbia to second life in Quebec.

2024: The final part of the search: Valerie’s paternal side

Valerie’s paternal side remained the hardest piece of the puzzle, since we had absolutely no info to go off of, only Valerie’s DNA results. Her paternal matches were low and the top one after nearly three years still remains at only 124cm. I had extensively mapped out the trees of the “Ontario clump” which most of the paternal matches were part of in one or more ways. They were connected by a few family names that had married each other for a few generations in mid 1800s London Ontario. However, many from this family had moved west to Alberta and British Columbia.

With the match splitting feature I was also able to see that Valerie had some unique paternal matches that were living in England or had very recent English ancestry. There weren’t enough of these matches to make any match groups or find a common last name though.

After literal years of searching, one day it just clicked and while researching and looking at the tree some more, I found the right family. There was a lady from the Covey family that had married a McKinnon and moved to Alberta from Ontario. They had a son Albert, who married a lady named Mary who was also from Alberta, but Mary’s parents were from England. Valerie had a match who was descended from an aunt of Mary- their unusual last name had caught my eye and I remembered seeing it in a tree of Valerie’s match.

Albert and Mary had only one son, which made it very easy to determine that he was Valerie’s biological father. He was born in the same year as Sara and grew up in the same area as her. Valerie was excited to have her biological father identified. After nearly three years, we are both very happy that she has her answers now!