Benjamin’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Benjamin’s biological father

Benjamin’s wife reached out on his behalf for help with his search. Benjamin was adopted and had already found his maternal side, but needed some help with his paternal side. He had a possible name for his biological father (David McDonald), a year of birth, and a little bit of family information. Benjamin had also done an AncestryDNA test.

Benjamin’s wife sent me an invite to his results and I got to work. The parent sides had already been assigned, so his paternal matches were easy to see. There were a lot of paternal matches, all 500cm or less, but still many good matches to work with.

I could quickly tell once I tried to sort the matches into groups that it wouldn’t be possible, due to Red River Settlement endogamy. Everyone was matching everyone.

I decided to take the top 20 matches and put them on a spreadsheet, and started looking for most recent common ancestors for each of the matches. Soon enough, one prominent pair of ancestors appeared: Aaron McDonald and his wife Cherie Morin. Most of Benjamin’s closer paternal matches were descended from this couple, which was good news, because it got me thinking that the last name, and maybe even the first name Benjamin had of his biological father could indeed be accurate. Based on the ages of Aaron and Cherie I figured they would be one set of Benjamin’s paternal great grandparents.

Aaron and Cherie had over a dozen children, and I didn’t feel like downtreeing them would as efficient as looking for the second common ancestor couple and just finding the union couple via last names.

I decided to look through the matches’ trees and start finding the other common last name connecting some of the other matches. Soon enough, it was apparent that some of the other matches who were not Aaron/Cherie descendants were connected by the last name Beauchemin, which was thankfully fairly distinct.

Aaron and Cherie had one son who married a lady with the last name Beauchemin, so I figured this was the union couple. The McDonald/Beauchemin couple had a relatively small family themselves, with only two sons and a daughter. One of the sons had the name David McDonald, and upon further research, I discovered David had moved east to the city where Benjamin had been born. Upon some Googling, I found an obituary for David whose birth year also matched the info Benjamin had.

I sent this information to Benjamin’s wife, and they were amazed at Benjamin’s resemblance to David’s obituary picture. Although he had passed away a few years ago, they were happy to have a complete family tree for Benjamin. This search only took about an hour from start to finish once I looked at the DNA results, so it was very nice to quickly provide a family with answers they had been searching for. Benjamin looks forward to learning more about his paternal roots.