Sonia’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Sonia’s biological father

Sonia’s daughter, Janice, reached out for assistance last summer with their search. Both Sonia and Janice had taken AncestryDNA tests, and from those results, Janice discovered that her mom’s biological father was not the man who raised her. She reached out hoping for help identifying this unknown man. I worked closely with Janice for this search, which also took me into records from a country I had never researched before: Antigua and Barbuda.

Janice had already found a common last name linking her mom’s paternal matches together. She sent me a collaborator invite to her mom’s matches and after taking a look through Sonia’s paternal matches, I agreed that the last name connecting the closer paternal matches was Payne. Due to some low level endogamy, which was expected given that Antigua is a fairly small island, the paternal matches were hard to split into groups- everyone was pretty much matching everyone. Despite this, the Payne last name was still prominent in the trees of matches that had created trees. 

Although some matches did have trees, most were not built out more than three or four generations, making it very hard to find any common ancestor couples between matches. Since that method wasn’t going to work for this case, I decided to start by looking at three of Sonia’s closest matches: Abby, Izzy, and Sasha. All three of them matched Sonia between 450cm-600cm. As well, all three girls were all young ladies around my age, making them likely at least two generations younger than Sonia.

Abby had a small tree out to her grandparents. Her paternal grandmother was Helen Payne, and I could see that Helen had been born in Antigua and died in Toronto. However there were no other details such as birth or death dates, or parents for Helen.

Izzy and Sasha also had small trees, and they too had a grandmother Mary, who had the Payne last name, who had been born in Antigua as well. Izzy’s tree included the parents of Mary, with her father being a man named William Payne.

Izzy and Sasha were half first cousins to each other. They matched Abby more distantly than full second cousins would, and I wondered if they were half second cousins to Abby.  I theorized that Abby, Izzy and Sasha might all be great half-nieces to Sonia, with Sonia being possibly a half sibling to each of their Payne grandmothers, with their Payne grandmothers also being half siblings to each other. 

Janice and I decided that the best thing to do was to find out more about Abby’s grandmother Helen and see if we could figure out how Helen was related to Izzy and Sasha’s grandmother Mary. I was able to find Helen’s obituary in a Toronto newspaper, which gave me her burial location. I had a very nice friend go to the cemetery in the east end of the city and take a picture of Helen’s headstone for us, which gave us Helen’s birth date. 

With that date, Janice was able to go to the archives in Antigua and locate Helen’s birth registration. Unfortunately for us, no father was listed!

Our next shot was ordering Helen’s marriage registration from the United Kingdom. Forty dollars and six weeks later, Helen’s marriage registration arrived in my physical mailbox, which also unfortunately did not have a father listed. 

At the same time, Janice had been doing some research of her own about the Paynes and determined there were two likely candidates: William and John Payne, who both lived nearby her grandmother. William was possibly the same man listed in Izzy’s tree, but we did not know for sure. 

Our last resort was contacting Abby or her family to see if they knew who Helen’s father was. Janice asked me to reach out on her behalf, so I sent Abby, her sister, and her father some messages on social media, as Abby had not been active in over a year on Ancestry. A few weeks later, I heard back from Abby’s father Daniel. He shared that his maternal grandfather was William Payne, and that his mother also had a younger half sister- Mary. I knew that had to be Izzy and Sasha’s grandmother; and my original theory about how everyone was related had been correct. 

After many months of research, Janice was glad to have finally figured out the identity of her maternal grandfather. She looks forward to learning more about the Payne family.