Nellie’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Nellie’s biological father

Nellie’s daughter Vanessa reached out for help finding her mother’s biological father. Nellie wasn’t adopted, but had never known the identity of her biological father. Both Vanessa and Nellie had taken an AncestryDNA test so I showed Vanessa how to add me as a collaborator to her mother’s results.

Nellie had a lot of paternal matches, with the closest one being in the 600cm range. However when I tried to sort Nellie’s paternal matches I was just getting one group of matches, not two or more.

After building a research tree with some of the closer paternal matches I could see that many of them were all descended from one common ancestor couple, which explained why they were only sorting into one group. I knew that Nellie was also going to be descended from this couple, and that they were likely her paternal grandparents.

There were three possible sons that could be Nellie’s biological father. Two had passed away, one was still alive. Vanessa had been in touch with some of the matches from this family, and she got in contact with Luke, whose father was the one they thought was most likely to be Nellie’s biological father.

Luke agreed to do an AncestryDNA test and sure enough he came back as a half sibling match to Nellie. Although her biological father has passed away, Nellie (and Vanessa) are glad to complete that side of their family tree and connect with newfound relatives.