Betty’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Betty’s biological father.

Betty’s search is one that has taken a few years from start to finish. Betty is an adoptee that took an AncestryDNA test in hopes of identifying her biological father. She already knew her maternal side, and her biological mother had passed away several years ago, so Betty just had DNA results to go on.

Betty added me as a collaborator to her AncestryDNA matches and I got to work. I split her paternal matches into two groups. One of these groups was French Canadian, coming from Quebec with the more recent generations living in the prairie provinces. The other paternal match group was from Newfoundland.

I started working on each match group, building out the matches and finding the common last name of each group as well as the common ancestors of each group. Betty’s matches were pretty good, and it didn’t take long for me to find the common ancestors for each group, which I figured were both sets of her paternal great grandparents.

I started working back down the tree, building it out and keeping an eye out for anyone from the French Canadian family that had married someone from Newfoundland or whose parents had been born there. However, I was not finding any connections between the match groups.

Locations were also very relevant to this search, since Betty had been born in Toronto. The common ancestors from the Newfoundland group had moved to Toronto, so that was good, but the French Canadian group was proving more difficult.

I noticed that two of Betty’s top three French Canadian matches were half first cousins to each other, and their shared grandparent was a man named Paul Dube who had briefly lived in Toronto in the 1940s. He was the only one of his family to have ever have lived in Toronto, as far as I could find. I started to think that perhaps Paul had had a son with someone from the Newfoundland family, and that son was Betty’s biological father. Betty was matching these half first cousins in the right range to be their half first cousin too.

In an effort to determine which grandparent side was which, I helped Betty upload to Gedmatch to see if there were any paternal X matches that could help determine which side was her paternal grandmother’s side. Thankfully there were lots of X matches on Gedmatch, and it helped prove that the Newfoundland group was Betty’s paternal grandmother’s side.

I started to feel more confident about my theory that Paul was Betty’s paternal grandfather, and switched my focus back to the Newfoundland group.

Now knowing that Betty’s paternal grandmother was a daughter of the common ancestor couple I had found, I started to look even more closely at the couple’s five daughters. One would have definitely been too young to have had a son old enough to be Betty’s bio father. Only two of the five daughters had descendants that had tested. Out of those two daughters, the matches from one of the daughters, Zelda, were matching Betty slightly closer than the grandson of one of Zelda’s sisters was, and I reasoned that they could also be half first cousins to Betty.

Zelda had been married twice and had a total of five sons with her two husbands. Her three eldest sons were all old enough to be possible fathers of Betty. One son could be ruled out since he had testers that were the possible half first cousins, which left two possibilities.

Unfortunately both of the two brothers were deceased, but they both had living children. After many months, the daughter of one of the brothers agreed to test. Her results came back and she was a perfect half sibling match with Betty, who was very pleased to finally know who her biological father was.

I was happy to have been able to help, even though Betty’s biological father’s own NPE had initially made the search a little trickier. Answers are always out there even if they take some time.