Janna’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Janna’s biological paternal grandparents.

Janna’s search was a quick one that was a team effort with my friend and fellow search angel Tina.

Tina had started assisting Janna, whose father was an adoptee. Janna had done an AncestryDNA test, so I got started on sorting her paternal match groups. They split into three distinct groups:

• The first group I quickly found the common ancestors for, and the family names were Alexander/Summers. The top match in this match group had an unknown maternal grandfather that the likely connection was through, so the first usable match in this group was 133cm.
• The second group was a French Canadian group with the common last names being Auclair and Pouliot .
• The third group I figured was likely actually two smaller distinct match groups connected by Janna’s highest paternal match, a lady with no tree, and no profile information, who was a 371cm match. The common last names in this group were Stanton and Morrison.

I started downtreeing from the Alexander/Summers MRCA and found the union couple with the Auclair/Pouliot match group fairly quickly. This union couple led to two men who were both in the right age range to be Janna’s paternal grandfather. I was able to find information about their families on a public Auclair family genealogy website.

With Janna’s paternal grandfather side mostly figured out, we started working on the Stanton/Morrison group, but the matches were much more distant in this group and although we had common ancestors, we were just not making as much progress with this match group.

At this point, Tina shared the information we had found so far with Janna, who then shared her father’s adoption order, which had his full name at birth. This was very interesting to learn, since his first name was the same as one of the Auclair brothers- Pierre. We figured he had possibly been named after his biological father.

With this new information, Tina did some more research and found that Pierre had been married to a woman named Pearl, who had the same last name that Janna’s dad had at birth. Research into Pearl’s family led us to believe that she was likely an adoptee herself. This also could explain why we were not making much progress with the Stanton/Morrison matches.

Tina’s research continued and she was able to locate the only other child of Pearl and Pierre, on Facebook. Janna quickly got in touch with her and they were very excited to have found each other. Janna’s aunt knew that she had a brother who had been adopted. She also confirmed that her mother, who had passed away, was an adoptee like we had suspected. Janna is very pleased to have found her biological paternal side and looks forward to learning more soon. Tina and I continue to work on Janna’s paternal grandmother’s side and hope one day we will be able to identify her grandmother’s biological parents as well.