Sky’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Sky’s biological father.

Sky’s search was a quick one that took less than half an hour. Sky is an adoptee who reached out for help with his DNA results and finding his biological father. My friend and fellow search angel Sarah had helped him with his maternal side using his adoption paperwork, but they needed some help with the DNA results for the paternal side.

Sky added me as a collaborator to his AncestryDNA matches and I got started sorting his paternal matches into groups. He had already identified his maternal side which made it easy to see who was on which side.

Sky’s paternal matches split into three groups, and I was able to find the common last names for each group quickly: Lockwood, Ellsworth, and Rudledge were the common last names of each match group.

Sky’s top paternal match was a man named Dan who was part of both the Lockwood and the Rudledge groups. Daniel was in the right centimorgan (cm) range, at about 450cm, to be a first cousin once removed to Sky. After looking at Dan’s tree, I was able to tell that my theory was correct and one of Dan’s first cousins was going to be Sky’s biological father.

I expanded Dan’s tree and looked at his aunts and uncles, hoping to find one that married a man from the Ellsworth family. Sure enough, I found one of Dan’s uncles had married a woman from the Ellsworth family. They had only had two children, and since only one of them was male, I knew we had found Sky’s biological father. He was from the same area as Sky’s biological mother, was the right age, and Sky shared a strong resemblance to him as well.

Unfortunately, Sky’s biological father had passed away over a decade earlier, and had never married or had other children. Despite this, Sky was very glad to have his answers quickly and was pleased to be able to start building out his tree some more on Ancestry.