Tristan’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Tristan’s biological father

Tristan is a Canadian adoptee and a first cousin of Andrew, another adoptee I assisted two years ago. We knew from Andrew’s search that Tristan was a maternal first cousin- Andrew and Tristan’s biological mothers were sisters.

A few years had gone by and Tristan decided that he was ready to find his biological parents. He knew the name of his biological mother, but had not located her. Since I had already helped Andrew, Andrew advised Tristan to reach out to me. I was able to provide Tristan with contact information for his half sister, and they were in touch within a day.

Tristan had taken an AncestryDNA test, and from matching Andrew, that helped separate his matches nicely so we could tell who was paternal. Tristan was born in Quebec, and he was almost entirely French Canadian, although he had about 15% English ethnicity on his paternal side, which would be important later.

Tristan had many matches descended from a most common ancestor couple with the last names Hamelin/Benoit who were born in the 1840s. They had a large family, which was typical, and I began building out the trees of their eleven children. Five of the children of the MRCA had descendants who had tested so I was able to rule out those children since Tristan was not matching anyone close enough to be from those lines.

I noticed that many of the children had moved to the US, and turned my focus to the four children that had stayed in Quebec. Most had married French Canadians, but one of the daughters of the MRCA couple had married a man with a fairly English last name, so I decided to build out the tree of this man, named Richard Atkinson. Richard’s paternal grandparents were born in England, and his maternal grandparents were born in Quebec. I started looking through Tristan’s match list to see if there were Atkinson matches, and sure enough, I was able to find some more distant matches that were descended from the same ancestors of Richard.

Richard Atkinson and his wife Johanna Hamelin thankfully only had a small family themselves, with two sons and a daughter. The older son was the same age as Tristan’s biological mother. The younger brother would have been not quite an adult when Tristan was born, so we knew that the older Atkinson brother had to be Tristan’s biological father. This was further confirmed when contact was made with a paternal first cousin match Tristan had on Ancestry, who was also adopted six years after Tristan and confirmed that her biological father was an Atkinson as well- the younger brother.

Tristan is very glad to be in touch with some biological family members and to now know of his biological origins.