Delaney’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Delaney’s biological father

Delaney reached out to me for help identifying her biological father. She was adopted and had some information on her maternal side via her identifying and non identifying information. Delaney had done an AncestryDNA test and had already identified some of her maternal matches, so that was helpful.

I split Delaney’s matches into two groups: The Gantz group, and the Feldmann group. Both groups were German but the Feldmanns had been in Canada for many more generations.

The Gantz match group had the closer matches so I started with that group and built out some of the closer matches to a common ancestor couple that had been born in Germany. They had many children, but out of the dozen or so kids, only four had stayed in the city that Delaney was born in. I tagged them with an Ontario flag profile picture in the Ancestry tree, and decided to focus on them first.

At the same time, I also worked on the Feldmann group. The Feldmann family group I had found the common ancestors for too, but the matches in this group were much more distant- all under 100cm except for one 190cm match who had only a nickname for her display name, and a locked tree.

The common ancestor couple was also a bit complex as it was a man who had married two sisters, as well as a third woman who was an aunt of the sisters, and had children with all three of them. Because of this as well as how far back they were all born, I was a little uncertain as to which woman Delaney was descended from.

I ended up sending a message to the 190cm match, thinking she was likely a second cousin or a second cousin once removed. She was helpful and gave the name of her Feldmann grandparent which helped me place her in the tree.

I was also struggling with finding a marriage between the families- nobody from the Gantz family seemed to have married into the Feldmann family and vice versa. I wondered if I was looking at another NPE situation or if Delaney’s biological father or one of his ancestors had been adopted as well.

In the meantime, Delaney sent me her non identifying information about her biological father. There was actually a quite a bit of detailed information, including his parents’ ages, the fact he was second born out of eight children, and included the sibling order as well as number of sisters and brothers. However, it stated that the birth father was from a French Canadian family which puzzled me, because Delaney’s ethnicity estimate as well as her matches definitely reflected German ancestry. I wondered if the birth father had been misidentified, which often happens, or wondered again if there was adoption/NPE somewhere.

After some time, I was looking in the Feldmann family again and building it out some more. I discovered the 190cm match, who I’ll call Ruby, had a great aunt who had eight children. Their genders and birth order in each parent’s obituary seemed to match Delaney’s information. The ages matched too. Ruby’s great aunt had even married a man with a French last name- Daniel Meunier.

Daniel’s family situation was intriguing and I immediately suspected he was adopted as he only had one sister who was 15 years older than him and his parents were in their 50s when he was born. He was also not in the 1931 census with them, although he would have been alive by then.

I had a feeling Daniel’s second born son was who we were looking for.

I decided to reach out to another match of Delaney’s who was around the second cousin once removed range, and seemed to be the family genealogist for the Gantz family. I asked her if any of the daughters of the common ancestors had placed a son for adoption and she knew before I even mentioned a name! She confirmed one of the daughters that had stayed in Ontario had a son named Daniel and he was adopted out of the family. She even knew the last name of his adoptive family which confirmed it was him.

I was grateful for this match to help confirm my suspicions and was happy we had identified Delaney’s biological father. Despite an adoption two generations back, Delaney’s non identifying information still helped, and like many of my cases, her paternal grandmother’s side helped lead us to where we needed to look. Delaney looks forward to learning more about her paternal family in the future.