Liza’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Liza’s biological mother

Liza reached out for help identifying her biological mother. She initially had tested on 23andMe and found several paternal half siblings who were welcoming to her. Unfortunately, her biological father had passed away so he could not be asked for information about Liza’s biological mother. As well, Liza did not have any original birth records, though she knew her birth last name was Westlake.

When I began this search, 23andMe had still restricted most of their features and I could not use the shared matches feature for the few maternal matches Liza had.

I recommended Liza take an AncestryDNA test to see if she would have some decent maternal matches on there that might be able to help with her search.

Six weeks went by and Liza’s AncestryDNA results came back. Some of her paternal half siblings were on there as well, so it was easy to see which of her matches were paternal and which were maternal. However, Liza’s families were from an old Ontario county that frequently has endogamy, so she did have some matches that were showing as both sides.

Liza’s maternal matches sorted into two main groups: the Layton group, and the Balfour group.

The Layton group was smaller and I decided to start working on this side first. Using Liza’s matches I quickly found the most recent common ancestors and narrowed it back down to a set of siblings (four boys, one girl) who I knew would be one of Liza’s grandparents. As far as I could tell, none married anybody from the Balfour family.

The Balfour side was very endogamous and many of Liza’s matches were related to each other multiple ways, which made finding the true common ancestors that she was descended from a challenge. After a few weeks, I was able to narrow it down to another set of siblings that I figured Liza’s other grandparent was from. This sibling set was much larger: fourteen children, twelve of which lived to adulthood! Of the twelve, there were nine girls and three boys. I looked for marriages to Laytons, but did not find any.

One of the Balfour daughters, Marie, had indeed had a brief marriage to a man with the last name Westlake- Liza’s birth last name. But Liza had no DNA connections to any Westlakes, so initially I looked this over- and with the endogamy in the area that I was researching, I thought it could have been a coincidence.

However, I started to look closer at Marie when I saw one of her daughters (Fiona) had been listed as a sister to her in both of Marie’s parent’s obituaries. This was confusing. No other siblings of Marie listed Fiona as a sibling in their obituaries. And Marie’s own obituary listed Fiona as a daughter.

Fiona’s own obituary listed her as a child of one of Marie’s other siblings. I was puzzled. What was going on!? Who was actually Fiona’s biological mother?

After some deep diving into newspapers from the area, I discovered that Marie had married Mr Westlake and had two daughters with him. Then in the mid 1940s, just a little over a year after Fiona was born, Mr Westlake had filed for divorce from Fiona after returning from war. In the newspaper notice, he named a Walter Layton as a co-respondent- meaning Fiona was having an affair with the oldest brother from the Layton family that Liza was a DNA match to!

At last, after months of research, the connection between the Layton and Balfour families had been found. It turned out Fiona was indeed Marie’s biological child but had also been raised by both her maternal aunt and her grandparents. Fiona had been born with the Westlake last name despite not having a DNA connection to them, which is why Liza also had no DNA connection to the Westlake family.

A few weeks after our DNA search concluded, Liza was contacted by the government and they were able to confirm that Fiona was indeed Liza’s biological mother.

Fiona passed away a few years ago, but I was able to locate her other children for Liza, who was pleased to find even more half siblings. Liza is glad to have her answers and have a complete biological family tree.