Cassie’s search

*All names have been changed.

Primary search goal: Identify Cassie’s biological father

Secondary search goal: Identify Cassie’s maternal grandparents

Part 1: Cassie’s biological father

Cassie reached out for help with identifying her biological father. Cassie and her twin sister Cayley were adopted, and had reunited with their biological mother, who had also been adopted. Cassie needed some help with their paternal side, as her biological mother now had dementia and could not remember who the twins’ biological father was. Their biological mother had also done an AncestryDNA test, so Cassie’s matches were easily split into maternal/paternal. Cassie sent me a collaborator invite to her DNA results and I got started.

Although Cassie and Cayley had been born in New Brunswick, Cassie didn’t have the typical endogamy (on her paternal side, at least) that I often see when assisting people with ancestors from New Brunswick. This suggested a more recent immigration to the province, perhaps within the last 150-200 years. 

Cassie’s paternal matches split into two groups, with her top paternal match being around 350cm, though the top match did not have much of a tree- mostly living people and the few lines with ancestors were not from the parent side I was interested in. Although she had a fairly decent match list, very few of the matches had trees, or profile information to help identify them. Many had partial trees, with one or more family lines missing, perhaps unknown. 

After a little while I found the common last name of Merritt for one of the match groups. I found two matches (186cm and 83 cm respectively) that were both descended from a common ancestor couple born just after the turn of the 20th century, so I started to downtree from that couple. 

In the other match group, the first match with a decent tree was a fairly low 113cm. I struggled to find a common ancestor couple within this match group. However, the tree of the 113cm match proved to be very helpful, and I could see that one of her ancestors had a distinct last name- Peabody. One of the Merritt couple’s daughters had married a man with this last name, so I built out the trees some more, and found they connected. As I searched the Peabody name I could see there were more distant matches from this family that I was able to place into the matchlist. After finding some newspapers I was also able to place the 350cm match to Cassie and see that she was a half first cousin. 

The Merritt/Peabody marriage had been brief and only produced two sons, who were both around the age of Cassie and Cayley’s biological mother. I presented the brothers as well as some of their half siblings to Cassie. She got right to work and attempted to reach out to the brothers as well as a half aunt. Fortunately, her half aunt was very responsive and able to help. She recognized the situation and confirmed that the twins’ biological father was the older Peabody brother. Cassie was very pleased with my quick assistance as this part of the search took only a couple hours.

Part 2- Cassie’s maternal grandparents

Cassie also asked me to see if we could identify her biological mother’s own biological parents. They had some possible names for both parents but wanted some confirmation. Cassie’s maternal cousins and half siblings had done some work on this side already to get to the possible families of interest.

Cassie’s biological mother had said that her own biological father was a man named Louis Perley. Cassie did have matches from this Perley family, but the Thrulines for her matches that were generating based on her tree weren’t fitting quite right. I had a feeling we had the right family, but it was someone else within the family. 

I used Cassie’s maternal grandfather line matches to build out a tree and eventually found the common ancestors, worked back down, and arrived at a set of siblings below a union couple. This couple had a child named Louis Perley as well, but it was a different man than the previous one- although they were related. I figured that this Louis Perley was likely the right Louis, since Cassie had matches from both of this Louis’s parent’s sides.

Cassie’s maternal grandmother side was also fairly easy, and I was able to narrow it down to a set of three sisters, all who were deceased. Based on the birth dates of when these sisters’ children were born, we had a pretty good idea of who the biological mother of Cassie’s own biological mother was.

Cassie was very to happy to have both sides of her biological family tree sorted out and thankful for my quick work.