Glenn’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Glenn’s biological father

Glenn’s search for his biological parents had been started by my friend and fellow search angel Sarah, who had located his maternal family using Glenn’s adoption paperwork. His adoption information had stated that his biological father was Jewish, however testing on AncestryDNA proved otherwise, and his biological father was actually of northwestern European descent.

Glenn’s paternal matches split into two main groups: The Harris family who were from Ontario, and the Scurrey family from Newfoundland. His top paternal match was just over 500cm.

The closest matches were from the Harris family and I started working on that side first as the family was not as big as the Scurreys. I built out the tree using Glenn’s matches and quickly found the common ancestors connecting the closer matches he had. They were born around the turn of the 20th century and had just three children- three sons that were the right age to be Glenn’s grandfather. However, none of the sons had seemingly married or had children with anyone from Newfoundland.

I put the Harris family to the side and took a look at the Scurrey family. I discovered there were actually two Newfoundland based match groups after I took a closer look at the matches- the Scurreys and the Jones families, and due to the usual Newfoundland endogamy, everyone was matching everyone. After some research and placing matches into the tree, I found the couple that connected the Scurrey and Jones families. They were born around the turn of the century too and had had three sons and two daughters.

It was harder to find information on the Scurrey families but I did manage to find most of their ages thanks to the 1945 Newfoundland census and a couple obituaries from the last decade. Likewise, I did not find any Scurreys that had come to Ontario or that had married/had children with anyone from Ontario. I started to think that perhaps Glenn’s biological father was also adopted or had an NPE of his own.

After almost a week of pouring over both families and not finding any connections, I started to think that Glenn’s biological father could be a son of the oldest Scurrey daughter, Lily. Lily was the only Scurrey sister old enough to be having kids before 1960, and Glenn’s biological father was probably born before 1960. And because we knew the Harris side had to be Glenn’s paternal grandfather side because there was only three brothers, it made sense for Lily to be Glenn’s paternal grandmother.

I located one of Lily’s sons, Rick, on Facebook, who was actually living in the same city Glenn had been born in. He also had a very strong resemblance to Glenn. Glenn messaged him and they were chatting back and forth and on the phone with each other within a few hours. After some figuring out dates and locations, it became clear that Rick’s maternal half brother Saul was Glenn’s biological father. Saul was the right age, living in the right place at the right time, and there were a few other situational things that also lined up.

Lily had also been living in the same small northern Ontario town that the Harris family was from in the time leading up Rick’s birth. Now we knew for sure which Harris brother that was Glenn’s biological grandfather, too- the grandfather of the three closest Harris matches who we now knew were half first cousins to Glenn.

Unfortunately, Saul had passed away, but his siblings and other children are looking forward to getting to know Glenn and plan on meeting him in the future.