Selene’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Selene’s paternal grandfather

Selene reached out for help with the search for her biological paternal grandfather. Her father had never known who his own biological father was, and had died long before DNA tests were available. Selene’s father was born in a fairly remote northern mining town in Ontario.

Selene had done an AncestryDNA test, and her brother had done a FamilyTreeDNA Y-DNA test, which showed a definitive match to the last name Nesbitt, but they were having trouble finding anything further.

I took a look at Selene’s brother’s Y-DNA test as I began to research, and it was clear there were definitely many matches with the Nesbitt last name (or its spelling variants), with more recent roots back to Scotland.

On Ancestry, Selene had already done a good job of sorting her matches into groups, so it was fairly easy to see which matches were from her unknown paternal grandparent line. Unfortunately, there were not a lot of matches, with only two being between 100cm and 150cm, and the rest being more distant.

As I looked through the trees of matches who had built them, I was again seeing the Nesbitt last name frequently. I also sorted Selene’s matches a little bit and found a second match group from Scotland, with the last name Moffat. Selene’s top paternal match was part of both groups, so I started to build out the trees of the matches, hoping to find a connection.

After some meticulous digging, I found the common ancestors for the Nesbitt group, all the way back in Scotland in the 1820s. From there, I downtreed the family and kept my eyes out for a Nesbitt that had married a Moffat. Sure enough I found it, and it turned out that Selene’s top match from this group was descended from this union couple of the Nesbitt-Moffatt families, so I figured I was on the right track.

The Nesbitt-Moffatt children were all born just before the turn of the 20th century which was the right age range for Selene’s paternal grandfather to be born in. However the couple had only had 3 sons, and one of them was the top match’s grandfather. Options for potential bio grandfathers were slim.

The other two sons, David and James, had moved from Scotland to Australia. I was puzzled. Surely the connection was in here somewhere. Was there a double marriage between the families? I went back and looked, but did not find any.

After a period of much frustration and puzzling, I decided to start searching for records of a Nesbitt in the town where Selene’s father was born. This proved to be much more efficient and I started finding records for a James Nesbitt who had immigrated from Scotland to the Canadian mining town in the early 1900s, and had lived there with his wife until she died in the 1940s. After her death, James moved to Australia, presumably to join his other siblings that had moved there earlier.

The main reason I had not found James earlier while researching him was because Ancestry was not recognizing that the James from Scotland that had moved to Australia was the same one that had moved to Canada in between. His WW1 attestation records, as well as other additional records, confirmed it was the same man, as his middle name was his mother’s maiden name- Moffat. It served as an important reminder to not just rely on Ancestry’s suggested records, but to go beyond and look for records in the place where the people lived.

James did not have any other children of his own, but Selene and her family are happy to finally have a name for their previously unknown ancestor, and are glad to be able to fill out that line of their family tree.