Melanie’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Melanie’s biological father

Melanie reached out for help earlier this year with help identifying her biological father. She was not adopted, and had been raised by her mother, so she already knew her maternal side which was helpful. Melanie had done an AncestryDNA test, so she sent me a collaborator invite and I got started.  

As always, the first thing I did was sort Melanie’s paternal matches into three groups based on who matched who. This resulted in three match groups:

• An Indigenous group, with one of the common last names in this group being Frank. A lot of these matches were in Saskatchewan/ancestors were from Saskatchewan.
• A match group connected by the last name Croitoru, originally from Romania. 
• A match group connected by the last name Năstase, also originally from Romania. Both of these Romanian match groups also had a decent amount of people from Saskatchewan.

I started looking at the tree of one of the closest DNA matches, Stella, at just over 300cm, from the Indigenous group. She had a well built out tree and I could tell that her great grandparents John and Dina Frank were the common ancestor couple for this group. I started looking at their children and looking at obituaries, death records, all sorts of things, trying to see if any of the Frank children married anyone with Romanian last names. 

The Frank family is very big so this was a bit of a task! I did find two Frank siblings that married people with Eastern European last names, but wasn’t seeing the last names Croitoru or Nenescu anywhere.

At the same time I was also looking at the Croitoru family. There was a DNA match, Lainey, at 144cm from the Croitoru match group, who also had a good tree so I was looking through it and keeping an eye out for any Frank family connections. Thanks to Lainey’s tree, I found the union couple that connected the Croitoru and Năstase families, which were Roger Croitoru and Pearl Năstase. 

I figured Melanie would be descended from Roger and Pearl. Based on the birth years of everyone, I figured her bio dad would have 1 parent that was a child of Roger and Pearl, and 1 parent that was a child of John and Dina Frank.

I looked at the obituaries of Roger and Pearl Năstase, noting that they had three children and 8 grandchildren at the time Roger died in 1987.

Pearl died 8 years before Roger, and they only had 6 grandchildren at the time she died. All grandchildren were named in her obituary. 

One grandchild in Pearl’s obituary named David Shomburg, caught my eye. His last name was very similar to one of the spouses of one of the Frank children. Faye Frank (daughter of John and Dina Frank) had been married to Roy Schomberg. I thought perhaps David’s last name had been spelt slightly wrong in Pearl’s obituary. 

I checked Roy Schomberg’s obituary and there was no mention of a son named David. It did mention two daughters Kaye and Teena from a previous marriage. Faye’s obituary also didn’t mention a son named David. But it did mention daughters Kaye and Teela- maybe another spelling error? Teela = Teena?

I figured I was definitely getting close, and somehow this was where the connection between the Frank and the Croitoru families was. After doing hundreds of these searches, there is just an instinctive feeling I get…

I then decided to search David Schomberg on Facebook, and thanks to his unique name I found him pretty easily. While searching through his Facebook I finally found what I was looking for: on Facebook, David referred to Faye Frank as his mother, and Greg Croitoru as his father.

David was likely born to Faye and Greg while Faye was still legally married to Roy or while she was still using his last name, hence why David has Roy’s last name but no genetic connection to the Schomberg family and also not being listed in Roy Schomberg’s obituary as a son. 

After finding David’s birthdate and where he lived, it was clear he was the only possibility to be Melanie’s biological father. 

Melanie was very pleased with my quick findings as this search only took about a day from start to finish, and she looks forward to learning about her paternal side in the future.