Colton’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Colton’s biological father

Colton’s wife Tina reached out on his behalf for help with the search for his biological father. Colton was not an adoptee, but he did not know the identity of his biological father. His mother had said it was between one of two possible men, and Colton needed some help with interpreting his AncestryDNA results to see if it was one of the possibilities, or someone else altogether. Colton and Tina did not tell me the names of either men, which helped avoid bias when searching.

Tina sent me a collaborator invite to Colton’s matches and I got to work. He had some very good matches, including one close family type match on his paternal side. However, that match, and many of the other closer matches, had no trees, partial trees, or only one line of their tree built out. The top match only had initials and no profile information, which was also not very helpful.

I split Colton’s matches into two groups and quickly found the common last names of each group: The Parsons family, and the Dennison family. Colton’s first five paternal matches were part of both groups, but no matches had useable family trees! None had obvious Parsons or Dennison connections in their tree, if they had a tree at all.

There were better matches in the Parsons match group who had decent trees, so I started with that group. I had to go down the matchlist a little ways to find the common ancestors within the Parsons family, who were born in the late 1800s. From there, I looked at all the children of the common ancestor couple, and saw that one of their sons had married a lady with the last name Dennison. That lady’s Dennison ancestors connected to the same ancestors as Colton’s Dennison matches did, so I knew I had found the union couple connecting the Parsons and Dennison families.

I next looked at the children of the union couple and figured one of their sons was Colton’s biological father. They had five sons.

At this point after figuring out the family of interest, I also was able to place some of Colton’s closest matches into the family now- his top match was a paternal uncle, and the two next highest matches were first cousins.

I kept Tina and Colton up to date with my findings as I worked and told them that Colton’s biological father was one of 4 brothers with the last name Parsons (one could be ruled out due to being a match to Colton).

Colton was pleased with this information and said no further investigation was required, as one of the two possible men was one of these 5 brothers. He was happy with my quick findings, as this search took about half an hour from start to finish.