Malcolm’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Malcolm’s biological father

Malcolm is a Canadian adoptee who reached out for help identifying his biological father. He had already found his maternal side, but needed some help with his paternal side search.

Initially, Malcolm had only done a 23andMe test, and had uploaded to the various sites available at the time (Gedmatch, FamilyTreeDNA, and MyHeritage. I offered to start by taking a look at his 23andMe results first.

I began by making a spreadsheet and listing his first 25 matches and sorting them into groups based on who was a shared match with each other. This resulted in six unique groups.

While doing this, I also kept a tree open of Malcolm’s maternal lineage. Once I finished sorting the top 25 matches, I started looking at their profiles, trying to find them on Ancestry as well, to determine which matches were from Malcolm’s maternal side. This would help isolate the paternal matches.

I had some success with this and eventually determined that two of the match groups were definitely maternal. Three were most likely paternal, and one match group of more distant matches I wasn’t able to determine which parent side they were likely from.

From there I started building out trees for the presumed paternal matches and looking for common ancestors. I quickly realized Malcolm’s paternal family was from the Red River Colony, as was his maternal side. The trees of some of his matches were very endogamous and I wondered if Malcolm’s biological parents could be distantly related.

I headed over to Gedmatch and looked at Malcolm’s results there, although there was not any closer matches than the ones on 23andMe- many of the matches had uploaded from there. I ran Malcolm’s results through the Are Your Parents Related tool which reported his bio parents were related by about 55 centimorgans- not surprising given the initial research I had done.

Malcolm’s closest paternal match on 23andMe, Nina, was fairly easy to find on Ancestry thanks to her unique full name, and I took a look at her tree. She was matching Malcolm around the second cousin once removed range, so nothing super close, but close enough to help.

Nina only had one grandparent line with ancestors from Manitoba- her paternal grandfather- so I started looking at his family in other trees on Ancestry. At the same time I was looking at other matches and trying to figure them out and find where the families connected.

I also found the tree of the third highest match on Gedmatch, a match named Liam. Liam had a pair of common ancestors with another match named Anthony. However the common ancestors were born in the 1820s so we were going up the tree quite a bit. I also suspected there may be a closer relationship due to the endogamy.

However, as I was tree building, I noticed that Liam had a great aunt, Dianne Fournier, that married a man named Jacques Armour. Jacques was the great granduncle of Malcolm’s match Nina. This got my attention as they were a union couple and connected the two distinct match groups, since Nina was part of a different match group than Liam and Anthony were.

I started looking at the children of Dianne and Jacques and found that they had only one son, Dean. Dean was in the right age range and location to be Malcolm’s biological father. There was also a remarkable resemblance between Malcolm, Dean, and even Dean’s father Jacques. Unfortunately, Dean had passed away several decades ago.

Although I was feeling confident with my findings at about the 99% range, due to the low matches and the endogamy, I suggested Malcolm do an AncestryDNA test to confirm it as much as we could. Perhaps there would be some closer matches there that would help- Dean had two sisters who had both had several descendants, as well as one daughter of his own.

Many months later, Malcolm’s AncestryDNA test results were in, and his top paternal match was a very good one- a first cousin; daughter of one of Dean’s sisters. My findings were correct and Malcolm was happy to have it confirmed. He has connected with the very welcoming cousin match and looks forward to getting to know other members of his paternal bio family in the future.