Janice’s search

*All names have been changed.

Primary search goal: Identify Janice’s biological father

Secondary search goal: Identify Janice’s maternal grandfather

Part 1: Janice’s biological father

Janice is an adoptee who reached out for help with her search for her biological father. She had already found and met her biological mother, who gave her her biological father’s name [Wallace Harvey] and a few details about him, but despite this as well as AncestryDNA testing, she hadn’t been able to confirm his identity. We weren’t sure if the name was a first and middle name, or a first and last name, since the second name given could be a given name or a surname.

I teamed up once again with my friend and fellow search angel Tina for Janice’s search. Tina helped get Janice’s DNA set up so we could see her results, and I took a look.

Janice had a maternal half uncle on AncestryDNA that helped split her maternal/paternal matches up nicely. Janice’s paternal matches split into two groups. One group was very recently from Scotland, and although the matches were better in this group, with the top match being 198cm, most of them did not have trees, profile information, or anything that helped me connect them together through a common family last name.

The second paternal match group was based in Ontario, and although there weren’t as many close matches in the group, I was able to find a common ancestor couple, but they were born in 1799 and 1802, which was quite a ways back. There was also some endogamy in this family even though there not being a ton of matches.

I told Janice and Tina that the downtreeing might be doable but it would likely take some time. I explained that although her Scottish matches were more decent, it was harder since they didn’t have any trees.

Janice then shared that she had had some conversation with her top match, Rick. Rick didn’t have a tree, but had shared his parent’s and grandparent’s names with Janice, and suspected she was on his maternal side since his mother had some cousins that had come to Canada.

I used the information Rick had sent Janice and found trees that had his parents and grandparents in them, who were all from Scotland.

As I looked at Rick’s ancestors, the last name of one of his great grandmothers on his paternal side stuck out to me- McDavid. I had seen that name in a few of the matches’ trees / some had it as their last name, but I needed more evidence that i was the last name that connected the matches.

I looked more closely and saw that the McDavid great grandmother had married someone with the last name Harvey- which was interesting, since that was possibly the last name of Janice’s biological father.

I started to look at all the siblings of Rick’s paternal grandmother. They were in several trees, but none had any children in any trees.
One of Rick’s grandmother’s siblings was named Wallace Harvey- the same name Janice had for her father. I decided to search this name in the British Columbia death registrations, since that was the province of interest, where Janice’s bio parents had met.
Amazingly I quickly found a death registration for a Wallace Harvey whose parents were Rick’s great grandparents.

This Wallace had a child in the 1910s also named Wallace, who grew up and eventually married a woman who had been born in Ontario. I built this woman’s tree up and found that she connected back with the common ancestors from the Ontario based match group I found.

Wallace and his wife had a brief marriage that only produced one son and daughter. That son was also named Wallace (the third one in a row) and we knew this had to be Janice’s biological father. Tina was able to find some newspaper articles that confirmed his career was the same one Janice’s biological mother had mentioned. Janice was very pleased that she had been given the correct name, and finally had a paternal family tree built out.

Part 2: Janice’s maternal grandfather

Early into the search, Janice shared that her biological mother was also adopted, although she too knew her maternal side. Janice expressed interest in finding her maternal grandfather’s identity as well, and I offered to take a look and see what we could find.

Janice’s bio mom’s maternal half brother had done an AncestryDNA test, which helped split Janice’s matches nicely. Janice’s maternal grandfather line had many matches, , which was not surprising since he was clearly French Canadian.

This family was actually quite easy to build thanks to easily available records and obituaries. I was able to narrow it down to one man, who happened to actually be an only child, due to his parents dying young shortly after he was born. His career also lined up with something Janice’s maternal grandmother’s family had been involved in, so we knew it had to be him. He had long since passed away, but once again, Janice was very happy to be able to have a full bio tree for all of her grandparent lines.