Josephine’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Josephine’s biological father

Josephine reached out for help with identifying her biological father. She had been raised by her mom and had never known the identity of her biological father. She had done an AncestryDNA test, which she invited me as a collaborator to.

Josephine had some known matches from her maternal side on Ancestry which made it easy to see who her paternal matches were. I started by trying to sort her paternal matches into two distinct groups, but I found that many of the closest paternal matches were all matching each other. So, I decided to start by looking at Josephine’s top paternal match, Cindy.

Cindy was in the first cousin range to Josephine, sharing about 900cm. However I knew that Cindy could be a variety of other relations besides first cousin, such as half niece or half aunt, or great niece or great aunt. As I looked at Cindy’s well built out tree, I could see that Cindy was not going to be a first cousin to Josephine.

Cindy was related to Josephine on her dad’s side, and her dad only had sisters, meaning that Josephine couldn’t be a first cousin. I looked at how Josephine and Cindy were matching their shared matches, and it was clear there was a generation difference between them: Josephine was matching all their shared matches about double what Cindy was matching them at.

It became apparent that Cindy, despite being nearly the same age as Josephine, had to be a half niece, and Josephine’s biological father was Cindy’s paternal grandfather, Cecil. This made all the other DNA matches make sense and everyone fit quite well. After sharing my findings with Josephine, she was not entirely surprised as there had been some speculation that Cecil was either her or her sister’s biological father, and he was known to the family. Josephine was thankful for my quick work and happy to be able to fill out the paternal side of her tree.