Jill’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goals: Identify Jill’s biological father, and locate Jill’s maternal half sister

Jill reached out for help last year with two different search requests. Jill was not adopted, but had done an AncestryDNA test and discovered she was a half sister to all her siblings- she had a non paternity event (NPE). AncestryDNA testing also showed that Jill matched her maternal half sister that had been adopted out of the family, who was a full sibling to all of Jill’s other siblings.

Part 1: The search for Sarah Braun

Jill’s maternal half sister’s AncestryDNA display name was Sarah Braun. Of course, this is a pseudonym for the blog, but her real name was an equally common name. Sarah had no tree, no profile information, and had not logged on to Ancestry in over a year. This didn’t leave us with much to go on. Jill had tried messaging Sarah but messages had gone unread.

Jill knew that Sarah had been born and placed for adoption before her parents had eventually gone on to get married. This helped give us an approximate age of Sarah. I suggested Jill apply for non identifying information about Sarah to see if that would help us find her adoptive family. We didn’t know if her Ancestry last name was her maiden name or married name.

Jill applied for information and a little over a month later, received the file about Sarah’s adoptive family. Although there were no names, there was enough detail about where Sarah had been adopted, her adoptive father’s occupation and position, minimum ages of her parents, and a mention of an older brother.

I recruited my good friend and fellow search angel Katherine to help us out. She has a knack for non identifying information and is renowned for figuring out what’s behind blacked out marker on paperwork, and I figured she would be a great addition to the team.

I made a group chat with Jill and Katherine, and Jill sent pictures of all the paperwork. Within hours, Katherine had found a lady who she thought was the correct Sarah Braun. She had counted out the letters of the blacked out adoptive last name and searched the specific occupation of the biological father in the county that Sarah had been adopted into and found Sarah’s potential adoptive parents on voter’s records. Katherine had then found a marriage registration of the probable adoptive parents, and used that to locate their obituaries, which named a daughter Sarah Braun (Braun being her married last name) in the obituaries. They also had an older son. Everything seemed to fit very nicely.

I was able to find a social media profile and contact information for Sarah. Jill asked Katherine to call Sarah on her behalf and confirm if Sarah was indeed her sister. Katherine did so, and left a message. The next day, Sarah called back and confirmed she was adopted! We had found the right Sarah. Jill and Sarah quickly got in touch to both of their delight. They met within a month and all of Jill’s family were very happy that Sarah had been found.

Part 2: Jill’s paternal side

While we were searching for Sarah, I was also hard at work on Jill’s paternal side, which took about five months total from start to finish. Jill’s paternal side was entirely Italian, so there were not too many matches, but she did have enough for me to start building a research tree.

Most of her paternal matches were connected by a family with the last name Spinelli. Two Spinelli brothers, Giovanni and Carlo, born in the 1870s in Italy, had come to Ontario and each had five sons and some daughters as well. Three of the five sons from each sibling set had the same name, which made a it a little confusing at first, but I eventually got the two families sorted out.

Jill’s DNA matches pointed to Giovanni’s branch of the family as the one of interest, as her closest paternal matches were descended from Giovanni’s children: Francesco, Matteo, Alessio, Luigi, and Domenico.

Giovanni’s oldest son Francesco had two grandchildren and two great grandchildren who were all decent matches to Jill, but not close enough to indicate that Francesco was the line Jill was from. So Francesco and his descendants were ruled out.

Matteo and Luigi did not have any children.

Alessio only had one daughter. Domenico had two daughters.

This case was a little tricky because there was a lot of variance in the centimorgans of the matches in each branch of the Spinelli family, which confused the WATO (What are the Odds) program and puzzled me a bit as well. The three potential sons of Giovanni were also much older than Jill’s mother. However, two of the sons had worked at bars, close to where Jill’s mother had also worked, though at a different bar, so we reasoned that the biological father could be one of Giovanni’s four sons. None of these four sons had had any sons themselves (or so I thought…).

Jill had made contact with several of her extended relatives from the Spinelli family who were welcoming and did their best to help out with the search too. Carla, a granddaughter of Alessio, agreed to do a DNA test to at least see if we could rule Alessio out as being Jill’s biological father or not.

Carla’s test eventually came back and she came back as a second cousin type match on the lower end of the range, which puzzled me. Was my theory all wrong? Was Jill’s biological father someone else besides one of the the three sons of Giovanni Spinelli? What if one of them had had a son, and that son was Jill’s biological father?

I went back to Jill’s matchlist and tried to see if I could find matches who were not from the Spinelli family, to see if that could help in any way.

Eventually, down the matchlist quite a ways, I found two matches, Sam and Jay, who were 57cm and 52cm to Jill, and were second cousins to each other. They were not a match to any of the Spinelli matches, and they only had one Italian line- the Marchetti family. Their 2x great grandparents had come from Italy to Toronto, just like the Spinellis, so I decided to start building out their family.

I kept an eye out for any connections to the Spinelli line, and I quickly found two marriages between the Spinellis and the Marchettis. Sam and Jay had a Marchetti great-grandaunt who married Francesco Spinelli- but this was the Francesco that was from Giovanni Spinelli’s brother’s branch. Francesco had no children.

Sam and Jay had another great-grandaunt, Tina Marchetti, who married Domenico Spinelli- one of Giovanni’s sons! I was thinking this had to be where the connection was. But according to a relative Jill had been in touch with, Domenico and Tina had only had two daughters.

I dug around some more and eventually found Domenico’s obituary, which listed two daughters- and one son, Geno Spinelli. Geno was very hard to find information on, which may be why he had been initially overlooked, including by his own extended family, but eventually we did find some information about him. He was only a couple years older than Jill’s mom, and had also worked at the same bar as his two uncles. He had been married, but did not have any children, and eventually passed away in his 70s over 2 decades ago.

Jill got in touch with Geno’s niece Cindy, who agreed to do a DNA test to see if she was a first cousin to Jill. Sure enough, a month later, the results were finally in and Cindy came back as a first cousin match to Jill. At last, Jill’s search for the identity of her biological father was finally complete. Although it took some time, she is very happy to have her answers. This search took multiple people to help solve it and I am thankful to all who assisted in helping Jill out with her search goals.