Michelle’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Michelle’s biological parents

Michelle is an adoptee who reached out for help with her search after contacting one of her matches, Katherine, who was also an adoptee, who I helped three years ago.

Katherine had messaged me saying she had a new match that needed help and that they were related on Katherine’s maternal grandfather line. I had already done fairly extensive tree of this side when I was helping out Katherine, so this was good to hear. I got in touch with Michelle the next day and we got started.

Michelle had very little adoption information, as is often typical for adoptees born in Quebec, but she did know her biological mother’s age as well as that she was from Ontario. She had applied for her adoption information and had done an AncestryDNA test in the meantime.

Michelle invited me to her AncestryDNA results and I got to work. Michelle had a very high amount of DNA matches- close to a quarter of a million. Her ethnicity estimate showed she was 100% Jewish, and I could see that the endogamy was affecting her matches, as many were labelled as Both Sides or Unassigned.

Michelle and Katherine shared about 250cm. Michelle was matching higher with Katherine’s half first cousins Gail and Manny- about 500cm to each. Katherine, Gail, and Manny all shared a grandfather, George Berger. George had two daughters and a son with his wife. The son was Gail and Manny’s father. George also had another daughter with someone else (unbeknownst to George), and that daughter is Katherine’s biological mother.

I figured Michelle was going to be descended from George as well, so I looked at Manny and Gail’s two aunts. One aunt married a man that was not Jewish, and their children were too young to be a biological parent of Michelle.

The other aunt, however, had married a Jewish man named Ben Caplan and had 3 sons with him. Using newspapers, I was able to find the ages of their children, and they were all in the right age range to be the biological father of Michelle. One in particular, Michael, was the same age as Michelle’s biological mother would have been when Michelle was born.

Thinking I had mostly sorted Michelle’s paternal side out, I went back to the matchlist and tried to find maternal matches- this was tricky!

However, there was one match sharing close to 500cm with Michelle who had the initials WM. WM was not a match to the Berger family matches. WM’s wife was managing his account, and had built a small tree for him, but it only had her side. I figured out fairly quickly his name was Walter MacDonald, but his last name was truly quite common and despite my searching, I initially could not find Walter’s parents. As well, Walter’s ethnicity estimate only showed he was 50% Jewish.

Adding to the challenge of all the Both Sides and Unassigned matches was that many of the matches had common names, and no trees. I decided to start building out a tree of a young lady in her early 30s named Aleah who was from Ontario. She was only 142cm and had a locked tree, but I thought maybe I could at least find Walter through building Aleah’s tree.

Fortunately Aleah’s family was easy to find due to their unique names, and as I built back her tree on both sides, I discovered that Aleah had a paternal second cousin who was also a match to Michelle. Ancestry’s Thrulines helped confirm they were second cousins too. This helped me know to build out Aleah’s paternal grandfather side some more and focus on that side.

I spent a couple hours just building out the tree and filling things out as much as possible. On one line, I went back as far as Aleah’s second great grandparents who were born in the 1850s in Poland.

Eventually, the tree building paid off, and I found a lady named Esther Rosen who was a first cousin twice removed to Aleah. Esther had married a non Jewish man named Walter MacDonald.. and it turned out, that Walter and Esther were the parents of WM, Michelle’s DNA match.

I knew we were definitely getting close, and based on WM’s estimated age, he was going to be a first cousin to Michelle’s biological mother.

I started looking at Esther’s siblings, and the first one I happened to look into, Paul Rosen, ended up being the right one to start with. He had one daughter Clara. Using newspapers and other sources, I found that Clara was the same age Michelle’s biological mother was known to be. To our surprise, Clara had actually married Michael Caplan, the man I thought might be Michelle’s biological father. I figured Clara and Michael were Michelle’s biological parents.

For having such little information, and not too much to go on with DNA, it was amazing to see how Michelle’s biological tree had come together so quickly. This search only took a few days to complete. Aleah turned out to be a third cousin of Michelle- which is just one example of how much the endogamy was affecting Michelle’s matchlist.

Michelle got in touch with her biological parents after about a week from when I started the search. They were very surprised she had found them with such little information to go on. They look forward to getting to know each other and maybe potentially meeting one day.