Geoffrey’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Geoffrey’s biological father

Geoffrey’s wife Josie reached out on his behalf for help with his search. Geoffrey is an adoptee and had reconnected with his maternal side, but he needed some help with his paternal side. I showed Josie how to set me up as a collaborator on his matches and we got started.

Since Geoffrey’s maternal side was known and he had some close family matches, it was easy to see which matches were paternal. Like me, Geoffrey was also fully Italian on his paternal side, although unlike me, Geoffrey had many more close matches to work with!

His closest match was in the first cousin type relationship range, and he had a few matches above 150cm, but then they started to really drop off which is not uncommon for people with Italian heritage. Many of the matches, including the closest match, did not have trees or profile information. I looked through the few available trees, including a tree done by a 138cm match named Abby, and saw some names that I thought may be relevant. That match also had a grandparent as well as several great aunts and uncles who had come to Canada from Italy, which was a good sign.

I decided to start building the tree out of the top match, who had a very unique name- we’ll call her Sianna. From her ethnicity estimate, I could see she was 50% Eastern European, and 50% Italian. Her last name was Eastern European so I figured we would likely be looking on her maternal side for the relation.

Sianna’s unique name made her easily findable and I was able to see she was a young woman around my age living in southern USA. Using the USA people search sites, I built out her maternal side to the grandparent level, but then got stuck- both grandparents were Italian and I was not finding much in terms of records.

I went back to Abby’s (the 138cm match) tree and started searching for the obituaries of the Italian relatives in Toronto, hoping to find a mention of Sianna’s grandparents. Sure enough, I found that Sianna’s grandmother was listed as a living sibling in a recent obituary of one of Abby’s great aunts.

Now that I knew how Abby and Sianna were related, I had a pretty good idea of where in the tree Geoffrey was going to be: he was going to be descended from Sianna’s grandmother somehow.

Sianna was 20 years younger than Geoffrey, so although her cm and age fit well for her to be a half niece, her mother was only 11 years older than Geoffrey- so there was no way she could have had a child that was a parent of Geoffrey.

I then figured that Sianna was very likely a true first cousin match. Eventually I discovered through some deep digging that she had two maternal uncles. Both were in the right age range to be Geoffrey’s biological father. One was deceased, and the other alive.

After a bit of digging, I was able to find contact information for the living man who was either going to be Geoffrey’s father or uncle. I presented all my findings to Geoffrey and Josie who were amazed at how quickly I had worked, as this search only took about two hours from start to finish.

A few weeks later, Geoffrey and Josie let me know that they had made contact with the living brother who confirmed he was Geoffrey’s biological father. Geoffrey’s biological mother also confirmed it once a name was given to her. Geoffrey was very pleased to have spoken to his biological father and looks forward to learning more about that side of his family.