Michele’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Michele’s biological father

Michele is an adoptee who reached out for help last year at the end of summer for help with her search. She had already found her maternal side but needed some help with her paternal side. Michele had tested with AncestryDNA as well as 23andMe and had no information about her biological father except for what her DNA results showed.

As usual I started by looking at Michele’s AncestryDNA results. Her paternal matches on there split into two main groups: The Poiriers and the Wakefields.

As one might expect, the Poiriers were the much larger match group and I could tell by looking at the trees of Michele’s matches that this group was going to be based in Nova Scotia. Most of Michele’s closer matches were from this group. I quickly found that the closer matches were descended from a couple born in the 1880s/1890s that had moved their family from Nova Scotia to southern Ontario to the town Michele had been born in.

This common ancestor couple had 14 kids, and my next step was to look at all the spouses of the 14 Poirier children to find someone who had married someone with a Wakefield connection.

The Wakefield match group was much smaller in comparison to the Poiriers and I could tell that this line was going to have fairly recent roots in England. The matches in this group were more distant.

Several Poirier kids in, I found the connection I was looking for: One of the kids, Joseph Poirier, had married a woman whose maternal grandmother was a Wakefield and had also moved to southern Ontario from England. I knew I had found the union couple between the two paternal match groups.

The Poirier/Wakefield union couple had five children, three of them being sons. Two of the sons had died and one was still living. They were all fairly similar in age to each other and to Michele’s bio mother, so any one of them could have been Michele’s biological father. Michele had no close matches on 23andMe so we weren’t able to rule any of the brothers out.

I encouraged Michele to reach out to Callie, who was one of the daughters of the three sons; one of the two who had passed away. Michele and Callie happened to have a mutual friend which helped with the outreach. Callie agreed to do a DNA test to see if they were half siblings or first cousins.

Eventually the results came back and Michele and Callie were a perfect match for half siblings! Although her biological father had passed away, Michele was very happy to discover a new sister who she has since met up with. She looks forward to learning more about her new family.