Rayna’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Rayna’s biological father

Rayna reached out for help for assistance with identifying her biological father. She was an adoptee, and had found her maternal side already.

Rayna had some non identifying information, as well as a first name for her biological father. She had also done AncestryDNA testing so we got that set up so I could view her matches as a collaborator, and then I got to work.

Rayna’s paternal matches split into four distinct groups, and I was able to find the common last name of each match group by looking at trees of the matches.

Many of Rayna’s closer matches did not have trees, with the first match with a tree being at 175cm. However, there were enough trees and matches to make finding the common ancestors of each group quick work as well.

Her top paternal match, Sheryl, at 404cm, did not have a tree, but had a distinct name, and she was part of two paternal match groups. After finding the common ancestors and the union couple of her match groups, I built out Sheryl’s maternal side some more, thinking that she was likely a first cousin once removed to Rayna, and that one of her male cousins on her mom’s side was going to be Rayna’s biological father.

After a bit of digging, I found that Sheryl had a maternal uncle whose wife’s tree led up to the common ancestor couples from the other two paternal match groups. My theory was correct.

This narrowed it down to a sibling set of five children, and out of the five, there were only two sons. One had the name that Rayna had for her biological father!

With a little bit more digging, we were able to find the ages of the two sons. The older brother was the one that had the same name Rayna had been told, and the younger brother would have been a little too young to be her parent. Rayna was very pleased to have her biological father identified so quickly, and looks forward to learning more about her paternal side in the future.