Esther’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Esther’s paternal grandparents

Esther’s search is now the longest one I’ve worked on, but it’s proof I never give up and that there is always hope for getting answers to one’s family mysteries. Our collaboration began in early 2021, when Esther and I connected on a Facebook adoption search group for Canadians.

Esther was searching for the biological parents of her father, Max z’’l, who was born in 1920, possibly in Montreal or Vancouver. Little information was known at this point- we mostly just had DNA results to go on. Esther and some of her other close relatives had done DNA testing on various sites, and I was happy to help with the results.

Esther added me as a collaborator to her AncestryDNA results. Back when I began this search, Ancestry did not yet split matches into Parent 1 and Parent 2 sides, so I had to do my best sorting her matches manually. Esther knew her maternal side, which was helpful, and many of her closer matches were from that side.

She had a large group of matches connected by the last name Kettler, who were all mostly in Saskatchewan, and originated from Galicia, Austria. We figured this was likely a paternal match group as this last name was unfamiliar to Esther. 

One helpful aspect about Esther’s results was that she was about 75% Ashkenazi Jewish, and we knew her mother was 100% Jewish which meant that her father Max had to be 50% Jewish and 50% Germanic. These ethnicities are distinct, meaning a chromosome painter could help determine which parent of Max was the Jewish parent and which was the Germanic parent.

Esther’s sister Sarah z’’l had tested on 23andMe, which had a helpful chromosome painter. I guided Sarah’s daughter through to view the chromosome painter, and it showed that both of Sarah’s X chromosomes were entirely Jewish. Women get two X chromosomes- one from their mother and one from their father’s mother- which meant that Max’s mother was the Jewish parent and his father was the Germanic parent. This meant that the Kettler group was Max’s paternal side.

Now having that information sorted, I was able to revisit the Kettler group knowing we were looking for males of at least teenage age or older- it was helpful to know I now didn’t have to look at any of the women in the family. 

The Kettler family was very endogamous, with cousins marrying other cousins for many generations. Some of Esther’s matches had inflated centimorgan numbers due to the endogamy. It made it very tough to figure out which branch we really needed to look at. Eventually, after a few years of genetically mapping the massive Kettler tree, we focused on a branch due to Esther’s sister matching with Miguel Kettler on 23andMe, and he was the closest match of them all, at about 330cm. This was significant because he was also two generations younger than Max. The What Are The Odds software also liked this theory the best.

Miguel’s great grandfather Gerhard was in the right age range to be Max’ biological father, which was good to see. Curiously, he had also left Canada with his family right around the time Max had been born which was very interesting as well. It seemed like a very sudden, abrupt move. We theorized Gerhard was a likely contender to be Max’ biological father. 

Max’ biological mother proved to be much harder to find, and ultimately, we ended up needing more than DNA results to identify her. On Gedmatch, I used the Are Your Parents Related tool, and it showed that Esther’s parents were indeed distantly related- not uncommon for people whose parents are both of Jewish ancestry. So both of Max’ parents were from endogamous populations! 

When Ancestry’s parent splitting feature arrived, it unfortunately did not help much with Esther’s search either. It confirmed the Kettlers were on her paternal side, which we already knew, but there wasn’t much in terms of matches from Esther’s paternal grandmother side. Many of the Jewish matches were labelled as being from both sides, as expected knowing the Gedmatch results, and the closest ones that were paternal only were too distant to make any connections with. This was across all DNA testing sites- AncestryDNA, 23andMe, MyHeritage, Gedmatch, and FamilyTreeDNA. We fished in all ponds!

When Quebec adoption records opened further in June 2024, Esther and I were ready, and she applied for her father’s information the day records opened further. They were slammed with thousands of applications for information, and it was over a year and a half later that CSSS were able to share Max’ birthmother’s name- Adele. From there, it was a few months later until additional information was provided about her, which was helpful as she had a semi-common last name that could be spelt various ways.

To our surprise, Max was not the first child born to his mother- he had two older half siblings, born in the prairies. Now that we knew Adele had lived in the prairies, it made a little more sense as to how she had met one of the Kettler men (still assumed to be Gerhard), as we could not find any that had gone east to Quebec where Max had been born. 

Through additional records searching I was able to find that Adele had lived to be 94 years old, even outliving one of her children. Esther had three half first cousins as well as other relatives descended from her father’s maternal half siblings. 

After five years of working together, it was amazing to finally get some answers Esther had been searching for for a long time. We joke that I am one of the extended clan- and it’s true, after five years we do feel like family. I am happy to have been able to help and am glad Esther never gave up on her search, even when it felt tough and frustrating.