Madelaine’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Madelaine’s maternal great grandparents.

Madelaine reached out for help earlier this month with her family’s search. Her maternal grandmother Christine had been adopted at a young age in the 1940s. All they knew was her birthdate, possible town of birth and that she had some siblings.

Christine had passed away before AncestryDNA kits were available, but Madelaine and her mother Trisha had both done AncestryDNA tests. For this search I used Trisha’s DNA results because she was a generation closer to Christine.

Trisha’s maternal matches split into two main groups, but there were very few matches in each group. One group I could tell had recent ancestry from the present day Czech Republic region, and the other group had very recent English ancestry- this explained why Trisha had so few maternal matches!

Trisha also had one fairly close maternal match in the 900cm range on the Czech side. She had a semi-common name (Debbie Chapman) and no tree or profile information, and had not logged in in over a year. I made a mental note to keep an eye out for her name.

I started looking at the Czech matches first because there were more matches in this group. I could tell the family name was Rokusek, and found the common ancestors that had come to Canada, but there were not enough matches for me to definitively narrow it down to a branch that I thought Christine was descended from. After half an hour I switched gears and looked at the English match group.

The English group only had 2 useable matches, both between 100 and 200cm to Trisha. The closer match had a starter tree that had his grandparents on both sides. The other match had a private tree. However, she had a unique name and using old newspapers I was able to build out her tree back a few generations. I discovered she was a second cousin once removed to the other match.

Their common ancestors had come to Canada from England and settled in the same town as the Czech group. They had four children- two of which were ancestors of the two matches. I looked at the other two children and quickly saw that one of the daughters Coral had married a man named Fred who had an Eastern European sounding last name. Sure enough, Fred’s mother was a Rokusek.

I took a look at the handful of family trees that had Coral and Fred in them, and was surprised to see that one tree actually had Christine in it with her birth year. She was the youngest of four full siblings and had three younger paternal half siblings too.

I then found an obituary of one of Christine’s paternal half siblings, Francine. Francine’s obituary only listed four sisters, despite the tree showing she should have five sisters- it didn’t list Christine.

Francine’s obituary also listed her sister Debbie Chapman- who was Trisha’s top match. So now we knew Debbie was a paternal half sibling to Christine, and a half aunt to Trisha. We figured the creator of this family tree had known about Christine’s adoption and placed her in the tree.

This confirmed that Christine’s biological parents were indeed Coral and Fred. I presented my findings to Madelaine, who was amazed I had uncovered all of this in just an hour. She recognized some of the family details as things her grandmother and mother had been told over the years, including one of the sisters’ names. Madelaine is very happy to be able to fill out her grandmother’s biological family tree further.