James’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify James’ biological father

Kim reached out for help with her late father James’s search. He was not adopted, but had been raised by his mother in England and had never known who his biological father was.

James had done an AncestryDNA test before he had passed away, so Kim sent me a collaborator invite to his results. I got to work sorting the paternal matches and they ended up sorting into two main groups. The matches were not super close, with the closest one being just under 200cm. 

It was fairly easy to find the common last names of each group. The first match group was connected by the last name Falkingham and the common ancestors of some of James’s closer matches in this group were born in the 1810s- quite a ways back. 

The second match group was connected by the last name Padworth, and the common ancestors in this group were also back nearly 200 years, with them being born in the late 1820s/early 1830s. 

I started downtreeing from both common ancestor couples, looking for the connection between the two families, who lived in the same town in England. I figured it wouldn’t take too long to find the connection. And I was right- eventually I found one grandchild descended from the Falkingham couple had married a grandchild of the Padworth couple. 

The Falkingham-Padworth couple had had a relatively small family, with only two sons, (Theodore and John) and one daughter. The sons were both in the right age range to be James’s father, although both were a handful of years younger than James’s mother. They were also definitely in the right place at the right time- John lived just a short half mile walk away from James’s mother in the year James was born. I also checked the other family lines and confirmed that James was getting matches from all four grandparent lines of Theodore and John, so we definitely had the right couple.

I started researching to see if either of the Padworth brothers had any kids. Theodore had been married the year James was born, and John had never been married. Although Kim and I both searched hard, we could not find evidence that Theodore or John ever had children. Because of this, there is no absolute way to determine which Padworth brother is James’s father. Kim was still very satisfied with my findings and agreed that John was probably more likely to be the father since he was a little closer in age to her grandmother. Kim is happy to have honored her father’s memory by completing his search.