Pearl’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Pearl’s biological father

Pearl’s search is another team-up effort completed earlier this year with my good friend and fellow search angel Jessie. Jessie had been working on Pearl’s search and had already figured out her maternal side, but needed some help with the paternal side.

Pearl had a great close family range paternal match on Ancestry, but as these top matches often do, the match- a man named Daniel Winston- had no tree, no profile information, and had not logged on in over a year. After taking a look at Daniel and Pearl and their shared matches, I figured Daniel was likely going to be a paternal uncle of Pearl since he was matching most of their shared matches roughly double the cm amount Pearl was.

Despite having a close shared match, the rest of Pearl’s paternal matches were fairly low, with the next usable match being at 126cm. I split the paternal matches into two groups: the first group was connected by the Winston last name, and the second group I was not able to find a common last name for. There just weren’t enough matches in the group, let alone ones that had good trees, and all the matches seemed to be from England.

Jessie had already begun downtreeing from the common ancestors in the Winston group, which were a couple born in the 1820s who had come to Canada from Scotland. It was quite a ways back to go, but we continued with our downtreeing and building out the family branches.

After a while we found a grandson, Wendell Winston, of the common ancestor couple that had moved to the province where Pearl had been born. This was notable, and even moreso, Wendell had a son and grandson of his own that were named Daniel Winston. We figured we were getting close.

We started building out Wendell’s wife’s side of the tree as well to see if that smaller match group Pearl had was coming from her side. Wendell’s wife had been born in Canada, but it turned out that her parents were born in England.

Wendell only had two sons, Daniel and another son who had passed away recently. Since Daniel was Pearl’s match, we knew that his brother had to be her biological father.

After rearranging the tree and attaching Pearl to the Winston family, Thrulines started working and showing that some of the matches from that small English group were coming from Wendell’s wife’s side.

Pearl was very pleased to have her paternal side figured out, and has since met some of her maternal family members. It is always great to team up with good friends who are fellow genealogists like Jessie to help out others.