Piper’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Piper’s biological great grandfather

Piper’s search is a search very close to my heart, because she is my own first cousin! Our biological mothers are sisters, and I met Piper when I was 20 years old and Piper was 13, almost 7 years ago now. Piper’s search took four years to solve, marking the longest duration I have ever spent solving an adoption case (so far!).

Using my own AncestryDNA results, I eventually solved the mystery of who Piper and I’s maternal grandfather’s father was (you can read about that here) in 2018. As I got to know Piper some more, I learned that her paternal grandmother, Greta, had also been adopted. Greta had met her biological mother many years ago, but her biological father had remained a mystery.

2021

Piper eventually did a DNA test around the start of 2021, encouraged by the other family and family friend mysteries I had solved and was hopeful that she might be able to solve her grandma’s mystery as well with my help. When her results came back, Piper invited me as a collaborator to her matches and I took a look.

Because all of Piper’s other great grandparents were known, it was easy to sort her matches into groups- anyone that Piper and I had in common were maternal, and she had many matches coming from her dad’s side as well. She also had some matches coming from her grandma’s biological maternal side.

There was one match named Jessa who we could not place on any of Piper’s known lines, so we theorized that Jessa was from Piper’s unknown great grandfather line. This theory was also boosted by the fact Jessa was in England, where Greta’s biological mother was born and where Greta had been conceived. Fortunately for us, Jessa was happy to chat and help out as much as she could. Piper and Jessa shared 177cm, which is often the range seen for people who are second cousins once removed to each other, although several other relationships are possible at this range.

Piper and Jessa only had one DNA match in common Ancestry, which was Jessa’s half sister’s son. So that was helpful, because now we knew the relation was going to be on Jessa’s maternal side. However we became stuck from there, because Jessa also had a family mystery- her maternal grandfather was unknown. She also had very few DNA matches which made it hard to know whether Piper was coming from the mystery side or not. Piper and Jessa uploaded to all the other DNA sites and there were only very distant matches which unfortunately were not very helpful- all less than 20 centimorgans across the board.

2022

When AncestryDNA’s match splitting feature debuted in 2022, we were now able to see that Jessa was indeed on Piper’s paternal side, which was helpful to confirm. Still, no new shared matches over 20cm appeared.

2024

In 2024, AncestryDNA released another feature, called ProTools that helped some of my stalled searches get resolved. It now allowed people to see how much DNA their matches shared with each other, as well as showing matches below 20cm. I could now see that Piper and Jessa did have many matches in common, though they were all very distant and below 20cm. Almost all of them were from England.

2025

2025 finally gave us the one match we needed to solve the search. I happened to be checking Piper’s shared matches with Jessa on Ancestry, as I routinely did, and found that she had a new match named Samuel that was 57cm with her, and 147cm with Jessa. Samuel was also from England and had a nice tree built out. I started looking at Samuel’s shared matches to Jessa and Piper, and was able to find some common ancestors between him and some of the very low matches. The common ancestor couple was born in the mid 1800s in England.

As I researched, I realized that Jessa’s maternal grandmother was a grandchild of this common ancestor couple. Samuel and Jessa were second cousins once removed to each other. This was a big breakthrough, because now we knew that Piper was related on Jessa’s known side- her maternal grandmother’s side.

I treed out more lines of both of Jessa’s maternal grandparents’ ancestors. We now knew Piper had matches coming from Jessa’s maternal grandmother, but I was curious about her maternal grandfather. I dug deep into the distant matches and was able to see that indeed Piper had matches coming from both of Jessa’s maternal grandparent’s sides. This was again, a very big breakthrough, because now we knew one of Jessa’s great uncles was the biological father of Piper’s grandmother. Like the centimorgans suggested, Piper and Jessa were going to be second cousins once removed to each other.

Jessa’s grandmother only had two brothers, Stephen and Ralph, so thankfully we didn’t have a large set of siblings to look at. Stephen had been married in the early 1930s and had a small family. Ralph had never married. I started looking at where these two men had lived in relation to where Greta’s biological mother had been living in the time leading up to her birth, and where Greta’s half sibling had been born a few years later. Greta’s biological mother had also lived in this town as a child, indicating a connection to the area throughout her life.

Location turned out to be the key- Ralph was living in the same smaller town that Greta’s maternal half sibling had been born in a few years later, whereas Stephen lived much closer to London. Piper, her mother, Jessa, and Greta, and myself, were all satisfied that Ralph was Greta’s biological father, based on DNA findings and the location Ralph and Greta’s biological mother were living at. Although Ralph passed away many decades ago, Piper and her grandma are very happy to have resolved another family mystery thanks to genetic genealogy.