Ruth’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Ruth’s biological father

Ruth reached out for help earlier this year with her search. After doing an AncestryDNA test for fun, she had discovered the father that raised her was not her biological father. Both her parents had passed away, so she only had her DNA results to go on.

Ruth invited me to her DNA results and we got started. Her paternal matches were decent and split into two main groups: The Carden group, and the Richardson group. The Richardson group was larger and had been in Canada for many generations, whereas the Carden group was much more recently from the United Kingdom. Both match groups had a fair few amount of matches with the overall top match in the 500cm range.

I got to work on both groups, finding the common ancestors of each group fairly easily. For the Richardson group, the couple was born in the 1880s and I figured this would be one set of Ruth’s great grandparents. This couple had fourteen children – with many of those children having testers. Some of those children had not had any kids of their own.

On the Carden side, the common ancestor couple was born the United Kingdom and had come to Canada with their seven children and lived in the same region that the Richardson family were living in.

However there did not seem to be any marriages between the families. I meticulously researched, to no avail, and concluded that Ruth’s biological father likely had an NPE situation of his own.

My next step was to figure out which family group was Ruth’s paternal grandmother’s line, as that would likely help lead us to possibilities as to Ruth’s biological father.

Ruth had already uploaded to Gedmatch and FamilytreeDNA which was great, so I took a look at her matches on each site to see if she shared any X DNA with matches that I could identify from either group.

Thankfully, on FamilyTreeDNA, she had a large X match with a lady who was from the Carden family group! So then we knew the Carden side was Ruth’s paternal grandmother’s side, and we were looking for a daughter of the common ancestor couple who had had sons of her own.

Amazingly this narrowed our possibilities quite significantly. Of the five Carden daughters, two had not had any children. Another two only had daughters. This left one daughter, Alice, who had two sons.

Of these two sons, one had passed away a decade ago. His obituary placed him out of the country at the time Ruth was born. However the other son, Marty, was living less than two kilometres away from Ruth’s mother in the time leading up to Ruth being born.

Ruth found contact information for Marty and reached out to him. Although he didn’t recognize the situation, he agreed to do a DNA test.

Two months later, the results were in and Marty was confirmed as Ruth’s biological father. She was very pleased to have her search solved and finally know the identity of her bio father.

As for who Marty’s own biological father was- we have narrowed it to one of the 5 Richardson brothers who do not have descendants that have tested yet. However, not all the brothers had children, so we may not ever know for sure which brother it is, but the search continues and this post will be updated if it is ever confirmed.