Reuben’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Reuben’s biological father

Rueben is an adoptee that reached out for help at the beginning of the year for help with his search for his biological father. The person who had been helping him previously thought they had identified Reuben’s biological father, but could not explain or justify their findings to Reuben, who wasn’t convinced the correct man had been identified. Reuben had parted ways with his previous searcher, who was unprofessional and should not have been calling themselves a search angel or genetic genealogist. (Spoiler alert: they did not identify the right man).

I started from scratch with Reuben’s search, and begun by taking a look at his AncestryDNA results and non-identifying information. Reuben’s biological maternal side was known to him, but his biological mother had passed away decades earlier. His DNA test results were differing from his non-identifying information, which described his biological father being of a specific ethnic background, which was not aligning with Reuben’s ethnicity estimate.

Reuben thankfully had many paternal matches (all under 300cm) and I sorted them into six unique groups. Most of the matches were part of two groups that were Newfoundland based. The other 4 smaller groups were English with recent ancestry from the United Kingdom. Fortunately the matches were good in all the groups and I was able to find a common last name for all six match groups.

Thanks to the Newfoundland matches being plentiful and having good trees, I was able to build out the research tree fairly quickly and found that there were a few union couples that connected both of the Newfoundland groups. These couples either had come to BC or had children who did, where Reuben was born, so I downtreed from them, figuring Reuben had to be descended from one of them.

One of the union couples had a daughter Martha who married a man named Frank whose parents had been born in England. Frank had the same last name that was connecting one of the smaller match groups. I built his tree out and found that I was able to connect a second English group to Frank’s pedigree.

Martha and Frank had three sons together, who were all the right age to be the biological grandfather of Reuben. However, Reuben did not have DNA matches coming from any of their wives’ sides. Two match groups were still unaccounted for.

I revisited Reuben’s non-identifying information which did say his biological father had only been raised by his mother. I thought perhaps the biological father had an NPE situation of his own, and maybe that explained the ethnicity discrepancy.

After doing some research on the three brothers and where they lived in the decades before Reuben was born, he decided to approach the the daughters of the middle brother William and asked if one of them might be willing to do a DNA test. The daughters would potentially be a half aunt or a first cousin once removed to Reuben which would help us either rule in or out one of the three brothers.

William’s daughter Susie was receptive and agreed to do an AncestryDNA test, so we waited patiently for a few months for her results to come in.

When her results came back, we were all very surprised to see that Susie and Reuben were an 1800cm match to each other! Much closer than I had expected!

Susie and Reuben were only seven years apart in age, and they were matching each other on their respective paternal sides only, not “both sides”, so we knew they had to be paternal half siblings to each other. It was reasoned that the non-identifying information Reuben had was likely describing someone else, which is not uncommon. The couple decades of age difference between Reuben’s biological parents was also a reason we thought William (or his brothers) was possibly a grandparent, not a parent. The two other match groups I had not been able to place were indeed from William’s side, not an unknown grandparent side like I was originally thinking.

Reuben was very happy to finally know the identity of his biological father and his newfound half sisters and other family are looking forward to meeting each other in person soon.