Meghan’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Meghan’s biological father

Luke recently reached out for help with his family’s search. His mother Meghan did not know who her biological father was, and she had done a 23andMe test in hopes of finding out who he was. Her maternal side was known to her.

Initially I was apprehensive to use 23andMe since they have disabled many helpful features since fall 2023- features such as showing the exact cm shared matches, if X DNA is shared between matches, and the chromosome browser (If you are reading this post and wondering which DNA test to do, please test with AncestryDNA first). However I was still willing to help out and and see what we could find. Perhaps an AncestryDNA test wouldn’t be necessary.

Since there is no collaborative feature on 23andMe, Luke and Meghan gave me permission to log into Meghan’s account so I could take a look at her matches. Luke had mentioned she had a maternal first cousin match, Albert, which was great to hear.

I began by looking at Meghan and Albert’s shared matches and I wrote down the names of the first three pages of matches that were shared with Albert. I then went back to Meghan’s main match list and wrote down the names of the matches who weren’t a match with Albert from the first three pages, which created the paternal matchlist.

There were quite a few matches, and the closest paternal match, Robert Richardson, was actually matching Meghan very similarly to Albert. When I converted the % of DNA shared between Robert and Meghan, using DNAPainter, it showed Robert was in the right range to also be a first cousin to Meghan.

Robert had many close relatives that had also tested on 23andMe, including his daughters, grandchildren, and great nieces. Robert’s own profile did not have any information, but his daughter had filled out her profile a bit, and included some family surnames and locations. She had also filled out that her paternal grandparents were born in the same town that Meghan had been born in.

One of these surnames was fairly unique, and I put it into Ancestry along with the location to see if Robert or his daughter had made an Ancestry tree there. Luckily, Robert’s own tree popped up in the results, and I was now able to see a nice full family tree of both of his sides. His uncles on both sides were all in the right age ranges to be Meghan’s biological father.

My next step was to find out which side of Robert’s family was the relevant one. I went back to 23andMe and looked at more shared matches with Robert. Many had the last name Kinney in the surnames of interest, and this was Robert’s mother’s maiden name. After some digging I was able to find Ancestry trees of some of the of the other 23andMe matches, which confirmed that Robert’s maternal side was going to be the side of interest.

Although Robert’s mother had many sisters, she only had one brother, which made it easy. He was the right age to be Meghan’s biological father and living in the same town. And of course, our strongest evidence was the DNA, which does not lie!

Although Meghan’s biological father passed away several decades ago, she and her family are glad to finally know her biological paternal side and complete that side of their family tree. They look forward to learning more in the future.