Evelyn’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Evelyn’s biological father

Evelyn reached out for help with her search for her biological father. I had already assisted her two maternal half sisters Josephine and Carol, and she was hopeful I could find her answers as well.

Evelyn had done an AncestryDNA test and her half sisters helped split her matches. She also had some non-identifying information about her biological father.

Evelyn’s paternal match groups split into two main groups: The Gosse group, and the Mercer group- both match groups were from Newfoundland, which aligned with Evelyn’s information that her biological father had been born there. Evelyn’s top match Taya was part of both match groups and had a small tree.

I started to build out the trees of the matches from the Gosse group and worked down from a common ancestor couple that had been born in the 1870s. I figured this would be one of Evelyn’s great grandparent sets.

One of the daughters of the Gosse common ancestor couple, Isabel, had married a man whose mother was a Mercer. This Gosse-Mercer union couple had married and only had 2 sons John and Cecil, who were both very young children when their mother died.

Evelyn had two matches who were the grandsons of Cecil, but they did not share the Mercer group of matches with Evelyn, so I knew that Cecil could be ruled out as a possible biological father as he likely had an NPE and was unrelated to the Mercer family.

John was much harder to find any information on past the 1935 census as his real last name was extremely common, not just in Newfoundland. Evelyn’s match Taya, who was in the lower end of the range to be a possible half niece to her, had John as her maternal grandfather in her tree, but did not have anything besides a year of death for John in her tree.

I decided it would be good to reach out to Taya for more information on her maternal grandfather John. Taya was happy to help and provided a lot of information about John, including many specific details about him that matched Evelyn’s non-identifying information and helped confirm he was the man we were looking for.

Evelyn was pleased to finally have her answers about her biological father was and looks forward to learning more in the future.