Julia’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Julia’s biological father

Julia reached out for some help with her search. Julia was adopted, and had already reunited with her maternal side of her biological family, but needed some help with her paternal side. She had done an AncestryDNA test and had some decent matches, so I was added to her results as a collaborator and got to work.

Julia’s paternal matches were indeed quite decent and she had one match in the close family range, who I’ll call Alice. Alice matched all of Julia’s matches roughly double the cm that Julia did, so I figured Alice was very likely to be a full aunt of Julia’s.

Alice thankfully had a small tree and a unique name, which meant finding the family and building it out was fairly easy. Through obituaries and and meticulous newspaper searching, we learned that Alice had three brothers, all in the right age range to be Julia’s biological father.

Although Julia’s biological mother recognized the unique family name of the brothers, she wasn’t able to assist further. Two of the brothers were still alive, and one had passed away.

Julia got in touch with Alice and her family to learn more about the brothers and see if anyone was willing to do a DNA test to narrow it down some more. We learned more about each of the brothers, particularly about the one who had passed away, named Gary. Gary had had a few other children and their names were known to the family. Based on what we learned, he seemed to be the most likely possible candidate.

Amazingly, not long after initially helping Julia out, one of Gary’s children appeared on Julia’s Ancestry matchlist, matching her perfectly as a half sibling. She was pleased to finally know the identity of her biological father, and although he has passed away, looks forward to learning more about her family.