Ashley’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Ashley’s biological father

Ashley reached out for help with her search for her biological father. She was not adopted, but had never known the identity of her biological father. She had done an AncestryDNA test and had a close family match on her paternal side, along with some more distant matches that were 230cm and below. She sent me an invite to her results and I got to work.

As always, I started by sorting the closer paternal matches into groups based on who matched who. This resulted in three main paternal match groups. The closest match was part of all three groups, and was likely a half sibling, but did not have a tree, name, or any information on their profile, so we could not use that match.

• The largest match group were primarily Americans and the prominent family name in this group was Klein.
• The next group was much smaller and the top match from this group was only 50cm. This group’s common ancestors were from Quebec and New Brunswick. The prominent last name in this group was Pomeroy.
• The third and smallest match group was connected by the last name Kennedy; with the Kennedys being from Quebec and earlier from the USA.

Next, I started to look for where the match groups intersected by means of marriages between the families.

Ashley’s top match with a tree was a man named Jason from the Klein family, so I looked at the Klein line of his family in his tree. The Kleins were all from the USA so I looked for any of them that went to Canada, and found pretty quickly one who did. Jason’s great uncle George went from Iowa to British Columbia and had two children. I was intrigued about the move to Canada and started building the family down.

I found the obituary for George’s daughter, Maria Klein, who had married a Pomeroy. Not only that, Mary’s obituary stated she had one son named Benjamin Pomeroy living in Newfoundland. Well, that was exactly what I was looking for, as that was where Ashley was born.
I started building out Benjamin’s paternal side and sure enough, his paternal grandmother was a Kennedy, bringing in those distant matches from the Kennedy match group.

Benjamin was a fairly prominent man in Newfoundland and although he had died over a decade ago, there were many photos of him online.
To my surprise, Ashley actually knew Benjamin and had met him when he was alive. Now knowing the identity of her biological father, some things made more sense to her. She is grateful for my assistance.