Mariana’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Mariana’s biological parents.

Mariana reached out for help with her search for her biological parents. She had a little bit of identifying information about her family, including the first names of her biological parents, and had done an AncestryDNA test too.

Mariana had done some research already on her DNA matches, and to her surprise, she had matched with her paternal grandmother. It turned out that Mariana’s biological father had been placed for adoption as well, but her paternal grandmother was not interested in helping find him or communicating with Mariana. Despite this, Mariana had other relatives on this side that were willing to chat with her and helped her figure out the connection.

I was added as a collaborator to Mariana’s matches. With Ancestry’s ProTools and her paternal grandmother match, it was easy to see how Mariana’s matches split into maternal and paternal.

With the paternal side somewhat figured out yet at a bit of a brick wall for now, I got to work on the maternal side and split the matches into three main groups. Many of the maternal matches had their own mysteries: the top match was adopted too, another match’s father was adopted, and many matches didn’t have trees or profile information. The top maternal match with a useable tree was a lady named Tanya at 113cm- the 10th maternal match down the list!

It took some time to find the common last names of each maternal match group due to the various challenges described above. Tanya had a good, detailed tree of all her extended family, and I noticed she had a half aunt who married someone with the last name Jacobsen. This was notable, because Mariana’s second highest maternal match (at 477cm) was a man named Daniel Jacobsen, who had no tree.

I found Tanya’s half aunt’s obituary, which indeed named Daniel Jacobsen as a son, along with many other children. I started to build out the Jacobsen side of the tree too, and noticed that Daniel had a first cousin once removed named Jack, who Mariana was also a match to. The puzzling thing was that Daniel and Jack were not a match to each other.

Daniel and Tanya’s match group I eventually found the common last name for first, which was Anderson.

As I looked through Mariana’s shared matches with Jack, it was clear that there was indeed a Jacobsen match group, even though Daniel Jacobsen was not matching any of them. The Jacobsen match group was the second of the three main match groups I had sorted the matches at the beginning. It just took some time to find the common last name. At this point it was clear that Daniel’s parents were the union couple between the Anderson and Jacobsen match groups, despite Daniel having an NPE and not actually genetically being a Jacobsen.

The third match group was also tough to find the common last names for, and there were two last names within this match group that I was able to connect a few more distant matches to. These last names were Newsome and Palmer. The P last name was potentially notable since we knew Mariana’s biological mother’s last name started with a P, but the matches were just too distant in this group.

The Newsome/Palmer group also had the 700cm match that was Mariana’s closest maternal match. He was adopted too, and I figured he was a paternal half sibling to Mariana’s biological mother. This was because he knew his birth last name, which is usually the biological mother’s maiden name, and it wasn’t a last name I was seeing in any of Mariana’s matches’ trees.

This meant that Daniel Jacobsen was likely on Mariana’s biological mother’s maternal side, and that one of his siblings was Mariana’s maternal grandparent. I figured this was likely Mariana’s maternal grandmother side, because of the P last name that was probably her father’s last name.

I decided to find Daniel Jacobsen on Facebook and quickly located him through his siblings that had more unique married names. Daniel had an open friends list, so I searched the fairly unique first name of Mariana’s biological mother, and he was friends with a lady with that name (Rhiannon). Rhiannon had gotten married to a man with the same first name as Mariana’s biological father, and I figured they had married several years after Mariana was born.

Through some more Facebook sleuthing I found that Rhiannon’s mother Anita was a sister of Daniel Jacobsen, so I knew we had found Mariana’s biological parents.

Mariana made contact with her biological parents, who had indeed gotten married, and they were interested in getting to know her too. Mariana also reached out to her full sister, who was surprised yet happy to learn she was not an only child after all. Mariana is pleased to have a positive conclusion to her search for her biological families.