Stacy’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Stacy’s maternal grandfather.

Stacy reached out for help with her search for her biological maternal grandfather. Although her mother was not adopted, she had never known the true identity of her father. Stacy’s DNA test had revealed many matches coming from her unknown grandparent’s line, and she had even identified some of the common last names linking the matches together, but needed a little help putting it all together and making sense of the matches.

Since Stacy’s other three grandparent lines were known, it was easy to see which matches were coming from her unknown maternal grandfather. I sorted these matches and ended up with two groups: The Charbonneau family matches, and the Dagenais family matches. With the French Canadian families, I was expected some endogamy and lots of cross matching, but thankfully the groups were fairly distinct, although there were a few matches that were part of both match groups.

I started building a research tree of Stacy’s matches and fairly quickly found the union couple between the Charbonneau and the Dagenais families. This couple had been born in the 1860s/1870s in Quebec, so we were going a ways back, but thankfully the records were good, and the families weren’t huge. There were also no double marriages between the families.

The union couple, Omer Charbonneau and Veronique Dagenais, had a relatively small family: two sons, and two daughters. One of the daughters had two descendants who had tested, who were matches to Stacy in the second cousin once removed range- exactly what I had hoped they would be. I knew it was going to be between the two sons of Omer and Veronique.

Fortunately, one of the sons had moved to Alberta in the early 1920s and lived there for the rest of his life, raising his own family. The other son lived in the same town as Stacy’s maternal grandmother, in Quebec. He also had gone on to marry and have a family of his own, with some of his children sharing a resemblance with Stacy’s mother.

Stacy is glad to know the identity of her maternal grandfather and hopes to solve other mysteries in her family in the future.

This search is in partnership with the Andrew Mercer Reformatory research organization.