Helena’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Helena’s biological father

Helena is Canadian adoptee who reached out for help with identifying her biological father. She had already reunited and met with her maternal side, but needed some help with the paternal side. Helena had done a DNA test with Ancestry, and she also knew that her biological parents had worked together and the name of the company they worked at.

Helena added me as a collaborator to her AncestryDNA matches and I got to work. She had a lot of paternal matches- many more than her maternal side, which was good to see. Her paternal matches split into two match groups, with 4 of her closest matches being part of both groups.

Both match groups had matches that had well filled out trees, which made it easy to find the common family names of both groups. From there, it was very easy to find the couple- Helena’s paternal grandparents- that connected both family groups. They had had a large family- with seven sons and two daughters, and I figured one of these seven sons was Helena’s biological father.

Two of the sons could be excluded as possibilities, since one was the father of Helena’s two first cousin matches. Another son had died a few years prior to when Helena was born. This still left five possible men!

Next, I checked the city directory from the year before Helena’s birth to see which men were living in her birth city. Several of the sons were living there- but only one was listed as working at the same company as Helena’s bio mother. We knew after finding the directory listing that we had found Helena’s bio father.

Unfortunately he had passed away many decades ago and had not had any other children, but Helena is glad to finally know her paternal origins and looks forward to learning more about her extended family.