Kenna’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Kenna’s paternal great grandparents

Kenna reached out for help with identifying her paternal great grandparents. Her paternal grandmother Margaret had been adopted in the 1920s, and though she had the names of her grandma’s bio parents, she was looking to confirm the lineages and trace their families back some more. 

Kenna had done an AncestryDNA test, and invited me as a collaborator so I could take a look at her matches. To my surprise, her paternal matches were very low, with the top match being just 67cm.

Kenna’s paternal grandfather’s side was known, so I began by building out that line. I also started sorting the matches into groups and ended up with five paternal match groups. 

Due to the matches being fairly low and many not having trees, it was harder than it usually is to find the common last names of the groups. 

Another challenge was that Kenna’s paternal side was mostly Eastern European. Her paternal grandfather’s parents were both from Austria, and Margaret’s biological mother also had a Ukrainian/Austrian sounding last name. However, from her ethnicity estimate and match groups, I could tell one of Margaret’s parents was going to be of Scottish descent. 

I was able to find the common last name of one of the Eastern European match groups, which was Zenko. This didn’t appear to be a name from Kenna’s known side, so that was good.

I then decided to simply search Margaret’s biological mother on Ancestry and see what could be found. She had her full name, birthdate and birth location, so her birth record index came up easily. From there, I was able to see that Zenko was Margaret’s biological mother’s maiden name. I built the tree out and eventually found Margaret’s bio mom’s marriage and obituary- she had no other children. 

I searched Margaret’s putative biological father Clarence, who was also very easy to find thanks to his unique name. He was in several trees, and as I went through Kenna’s Scottish matches, it was clear that there were no matches coming from Clarence’s family, and he had very likely been misidentified. 

I started doing a deep dive on the Scottish matches, and the top match, Joe, was only 60cm, which was not very close. However I reasoned if he was a match to Kenna’s grandmother, the cm they would share would be roughly around 240cm, which is actually quite a good match. 

I was able to find two sets of common ancestors within the Scottish matches, although both sets of couples were born in the early 1800s, so it was a long ways back! I began tree surfing to find branches that had come to Canada, but had little luck.

At the same time, I built out the tree of the top Scottish match, Joe, and found that his maternal grandmother’s line led back to both of the common ancestor couples I had found. Joe’s maternal grandmother’s siblings were around the right age range to be the parent of Margaret, so I began searching for them. To my surprise (although it is sort of instinct at this point) just one of Joe’s great uncles had come to Canada, to the specific town that Margaret had been born in. He lived just two kilometers away from Margaret’s biological mother. He had married, but also had not had any other children.

I was satisfied that I had found the true biological father of Margaret. Kenna was pleased with my findings especially as this search took less than a day from start to finish.