Sasha’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Sasha’s biological father

Sasha reached out to me over Facebook with help finding her biological father. She was adopted, and knew her maternal side, but needed some help with her paternal side.

Sasha added me to her DNA matches as a collaborator and sent me an invite to the research tree she had put together. She had done a lot of work sorting her paternal matches into groups and building a research tree connecting many of them.

Her paternal matches were decent and she had four fairly close ones:

-Nate Turner at 1150cm

-Walter Kennedy, at 750cm

-Nate’s daughter, Kennedy at 740cm

-Greg Turner at 530cm

I started to figure out the family connections and jotted them down in a spreadsheet along with the centimorgans (cm) of how the four matches matched and were related to each other:

Greg was Nate’s nephew / Kennedy’s first cousin. Walter was Nate’s first cousin once removed through Nate’s mother’s side, whose maiden name was Kennedy, hence why his daughter had that name as her first name.

As I started to look more at the shared matches of these four matches, I noticed, although they all matched each other, Walter’s shared matches with Sasha were all very different than Nate, Kennedy and Greg’s matches with Sasha.

Walter seemed to be related via his mother’s side: his maternal grandparents were the clear union couple that connected many of Sasha’s more distant matches.

And Nate, curiously, was not matching Sasha through his mother’s Kennedy side that he was related to Walter through, but instead, related through his paternal side. Nate’s paternal grandparents were clearly another union couple that connected all of the matches in common with him.

It was a real brain bender, and I stared at the tree long and hard before I realized what the scenario had to be to make Sasha’s cm numbers fit with everyone.

Walter was related through his mother’s side and was not a first cousin of Sasha due to there being a clear generational difference between them when looking at their shared matches. He was in the right age range to be a half uncle, so I looked into that possibility. Walter had two brothers, Gordon and Stanley, that were in the right age range to be Sasha’s biological father.

With Nate, his daughter and nephew matching Sasha so closely as well, I realized that Nate’s father had to also be the biological father of Sasha’s biological father. (what a sentence!)

It started to come together and I realized that both Nate and Walter were half siblings to Sasha’s biological father due to the NPE that Sasha’s biological father had. Walter was from Sasha’s paternal grandmother’s side, and Nate was from Sasha’s paternal grandfather’s side.

The NPE was definitely an unusual one. Based on the DNA findings, we reasoned that Walter’s mother (who has passed away) had an affair with her husband’s paternal aunt’s husband (Nate’s father), resulting in a son that she raised as her husband’s. Initially confusing and complex, but as always, DNA doesn’t lie and helped sort out the puzzle.

Sasha had already looked at Gordon and Stanley as possibilities, but due to not having DNA from their father’s side, had ruled them out. However, I then learned that Stanley had lived in the same building as Sasha’s biological mother. Due to some additional information learned, Sasha was confident that Stanley was her biological father. Unfortunately, he had passed away over two decades ago, but Sasha is very glad to have her paternal side untangled and looks forward to connecting with her newfound relatives.