Lena’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Locate Lena’s biological mother

Lena reached out for help locating her biological mother. She had a considerable amount of information: her biological mother’s full name (Betty Pearson), age, birthdate, birth location, names of both parents, and even some details about her siblings. Lena even had a yearbook picture of her. Lena had met her biological father already, but she needed help tracking down Betty.

Lena had done an AncestryDNA test but her matches were not close at all. Her top maternal match was 115cm and had no tree. Despite the low matches I did what I always do and started grouping the matches based on who matched who.

The matches split into five main groups. I was only able to find the common last name for two of the match groups. One was Doucette, based in Quebec and the top match in this group was 107cm. The other was Lefleur, also Quebec based, and the top useable match in this group was only 65cm. The other match groups looked to all be United Kingdom based.

Both the Doucette and the Lefleur match groups had a couple matches descended from a most common recent ancestor couple in each group. Since both groups were Quebec based I figured they likely connected somewhere, and I began to build the tree down from both MRCA couples, who were both born in the 1850s.

After about 45 minutes of tree building I found the union couple that connected the families: one of the granddaughters of the Doucette MRCA had married one of the sons of the Lefleur couple. I found the granddaughter’s obituary from 1966, which listed a daughter, Daisy, with the last name Pearson living in Quebec.

From there I went to GenealogieQuebec and searched marriages for a couple with the last names Lefleur and Pearson. I got one result: A man with the last name Pearson had married Daisy Lefleur who was the daughter of the Doucette/Lefleur union couple. Daisy’s mother’s obituary had not listed Daisy’s husband’s first name, so now I had it, and Daisy’s husband’s name -Albert- was the same name that Lena had for Betty’s father. (It also turned out the name that Lena had for her maternal grandmother was incorrect).

With this new information I Googled “Albert Lefleur obituary”, figuring he had likely passed away since he had been born over a century ago. I found his obituary which listed his three children’s first names, one of which was Betty. We were getting close!

The obituary did not give Betty’s husband’s last name or where they were living, so I went back to Ancestry to see if Albert Lefleur was in any other Ancestry trees. He was in one tree which had been made by a granddaughter. This granddaughter’s tree also had her other grandfather in it, from her paternal side, so I looked for his obituary and found it quickly. In it, it listed Betty, her husband and their daughter Jenna. Now I had Betty’s full name and where she was living.

Using the other names in Jenna’s paternal grandfather’s obituary, I quickly found Betty’s Facebook account through her relatives’ accounts’ friends lists. Betty looked just like the photo Lena had, and there were also birthday wishes posted on the date Lena had for her biological mother’s birthday.

Lena was amazed with my quick findings as this search took less than two hours from start to finish. She has connected with her biological mother and half sister who were very happy that she had found them.