Julie’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Julie’s paternal grandfather.

Julie reached out for help recently for help with identifying her paternal grandfather. Her father was a Canadian adoptee born in the 1940s. Julie had done some great research of her own already and had identified her paternal grandmother Daisy, but needed some help with her paternal grandfather side since she had no information except for her own DNA to go on.

Julie added me as a collaborator to her AncestryDNA matches and I got to work. I first built out a tree of Daisy’s side so I could isolate those matches easily.

Julie’s paternal matches split into four main groups. The matches that were the closest (though all her paternal matches were under 400 centimorgans) were from Daisy’s lines. This left me with three match groups:

• The Bainbridge family group, which was based mostly in Albany, New York
• The Sterling family group, also mainly based in Albany
• The Ryan family group, which was based in Nova Scotia

Many of the matches from these groups had no trees or only partial trees. The closest match with a useable tree shared 106cm with Julie.

Because I was working with very distant matches, the most recent common ancestors for both the Bainbridge and Sterling match groups were born in the late 1700s and early 1800s. However, because both families had been in America for several centuries, they were well documented. Thankfully because of their unique real names, I was able to find the union couple between the Bainbridge and the Sterling families after about four hours of searching.

The union couple had a small family, with only two children- two sons. One of these sons had married a woman with the last name Ryan… and her parents were born in Nova Scotia. I knew we were getting close.

The union couple between the Albany based families and the Nova Scotia based family had only had one son of their own, Clarence Bainbridge. Clarence was born in New York in 1918, and died while serving his country in WW2, only two months after Julie’s father was born.

At first, I wondered how Clarence and Dolly could have met, since they were in different countries and I hadn’t found record of either of them going across the border (although, there was not too far of a distance between them). However, Julie’s research skills continued to shine and she quickly found a newspaper article that mentioned Clarence had done his pilot training with the RCAF in Ontario for 10 months, and this occurred in the time frame that Julie’s father was conceived in.

Julie also discovered that Clarence had another son, born 7 months after he died during WW2, with his wife that he was only briefly married to before his premature death. She was able to locate him as he was still alive, and even found a picture of him. The resemblance to between the half brothers was remarkable!

Julie and her father are happy to have answers about their once previously unknown side of their family.