Amber’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Amber’s biological paternal grandparents

Amber reached out for help with identifying her dad Carl’s biological parents. He was an adoptee and they had a bit of information, including his last name at birth as well as place of birth.

Amber and Carl had both done AncestryDNA tests, and for this search I viewed Amber’s results, and used Ancestry’s ProTools feature to see the centimorgans shared between Carl and his matches.

Carl’s closest match was just over 1000cm, which was a very good match! This match was a man named James who was a similar age to Carl and had a little bit of a tree started for his mother’s side only. Thankfully, I determined that the relation was on James’ maternal side after looking at the shared matches and their family trees.

Carl had DNA matches from both of James’ maternal grandparents’ families, so I knew James was going to be a first cousin match. James only had one aunt and one uncle- the family was fairly small. Because the family last name was not Carl’s last name at birth, I figured that this was likely Carl’s paternal side, and that James’ uncle was likely Carl’s biological father.

I marked all of the matches Carl had in common with James with a blue colored dot, so I could tell which matches were not from that parent’s side, and started looking down the match list for ones coming from Carl’s other parent side. I found two matches [that weren’t matches to James] that were first cousins twice removed with each other. I started building down from these two matches’ most recent common ancestors, who were born in the early 1900s.

As I was adding spouses of the MRCA’s children, I noticed one of the daughters had married someone with the last name Larochelle- and this was Carl’s birth last name. I looked at the obituaries of this couple, and found that one of their daughters had married Carl’s match James’s maternal uncle. My theory about James’ uncle being Carl’s biological father was correct, and I now knew that Carl’s biological parents had gone on to get married a few years after he was born.

Amber was surprised and pleased to learn that her paternal grandparents were still together and that her dad had some full siblings. They look forward to learning more about the Larochelle family soon.