Tamara’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Tamara’s biological paternal grandfather

Tamara is a family friend who reached out for help with her search recently after receiving her AncestryDNA results. Her late father was adopted, and she knew his biological mother’s name and had been in touch with some relatives from her side. Tamara was looking for information about her father’s biological father, and I offered to help out.

I started by sorting Tamara’s paternal matches into groups, as I always do. Her paternal matches were decent, with the top one being in the 300cm range, but the majority of the paternal matches seemed to be from one group. There were a few smaller, more distant match groups, which made me think that the biological father was going to be from Europe. The main paternal match group was Scottish, with matches or their ancestors all from the town of Ayr.

I went through the trees of a few of the closer paternal matches and saw the last names Carmichael and Angus in a handful of trees. I then decided I better start building out the tree of Tamara’s paternal grandmother Daisy to see which matches were from her side.

Daisy, who was deceased, was born in Canada, but her parents were both born in England. I found her obituary which mentioned many relatives, including a son named James Carmichael who had predeceased her.

I was intrigued by the Carmichael last name, having seen it in many of Tamara’s matches’ trees, and decided to look into James some more and find out who his father was. I found James’ death registration which listed his father’s full name (Ross Carmichael) as well as birth location- which was Ayr, Scotland. James had been born only 18 months after Tamara’s dad.

I began to build Ross’s family tree out and quickly determined that Tamara’s Carmichael and Angus matches had to be from his family. Ross had come to Canada with his family as a child and settled in the same city as Daisy’s family. Per some records, Ross and Daisy had been married briefly before his death at the young age of 32. She had signed his death registration as his wife, although I was unable to find an official marriage source.

Tamara was very surprised and pleased with how quickly this search had come together, given that it took about half an hour from start to finish. Some of her bio cousins, who we now knew were her full bio cousins, were equally surprised to know their dad had a full sibling. Tamara is happy to know more about her origins and looks forward to learning more in the future.