Roland’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Roland’s biological father

Roland is an adoptee who reached out for help with finding his biological father. He had already identified his biological mother, and she was deceased, so he turned to AncestryDNA testing in hopes that would help. It definitely did, as this search took less than an hour from start to end thanks to a great match.

Roland had done a tree of his maternal side so I was able to see which of his matches were maternal and paternal. His top paternal match was a close family type match, at around 1500 centimorgans! It was a man with a very common first and last name -Peter Scott-, and no tree or profile details.

The next highest paternal match was Peter’s son Jack. I was able to tell this because of Ancestry’s ProTools feature that showed they were father/son. Jack had a very nice family tree, and I kept it open while I looked at Roland’s other paternal matches.

I quickly was able to see that Roland had DNA matches from both of Peter’s paternal grandparents. Since Peter was a close family match to Roland, I knew there was only a few possibilities of relationships:

Grandfather, Grandson, Half brother, Uncle, or Nephew.

Of course, we were able to eliminate Peter as a grandfather, grandson, and nephew very easily. Now we knew Peter was either going to be an uncle or a half brother to Roland.

I found obituaries for Peter’s father and grandparents. Peter’s father only had two sisters, no brothers, so the uncle possibility was ruled out. This left only the half brother relationship as a possibility for Peter and Roland.

I also took a look at how Peter was matching their shared matches, and they were all roughly the same centimorgan range as Roland- there was no obvious halved cm numbers like there usually is for uncle/nephew relationships. This was another indication Peter was Roland’s half brother.

Although Peter’s father had died many years ago, Roland was glad to finally know the identity of his biological father.