Jade’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Jade’s biological parents

Jade reached out for help with her search for her biological parents recently. She was adopted, and had not yet received any of her adoption information- she only knew that her biological mother was a teenager when Jade was born. Jade had also done an AncestryDNA test, and I offered to help with that as much as I could until her records came back.

Jade invited me as a collaborator to her AncestryDNA results. Her top match was a half sibling who similarly was also adopted and did not have their records, so they were unsure which parent they shared.

As I always do, I started by sorting all the matches 75cm and up based on who matched who. This resulted in three match groups on Parent 1 side and 2 match groups on Parent 2 side. Jade’s half sibling Harris was on Parent 1’s side, but I decided to start working on Parent 2 side because there were only two match groups and I figured it would be easier to find the union couple, which would be one set of Jade’s biological grandparents.

I was able to find the common last names of each of the Parent 2 match groups quite easily as many matches had good trees. Jade’s second best match on Parent 2 side was a lady named Millie who was likely going to be an older first cousin once removed to Jade. Millie’s mother only had one sibling, and that sibling had married a man from the family that Jade’s matches from other Parent 2 match group were coming from, so I knew I had found the union couple that were one set of Jade’s grandparents.

Using obituaries, I found that this union couple had had two daughters and a son. One of them was going to be a biological parent of Jade. They were all still living, and I was not able to determine any birthdates, but based on when their parents were married, I reasoned that all of them would be in the right age range to be a biological parent of Jade.

With that side mostly sorted, I switched gears and started to work on the Parent 1 side matches, hoping I might find a sibling set on the other parent side that was only boys or only girls that would help me figure out which parent side was which.

After Jade’s half sibling, the closest match on Parent 1 side was just under 290cm. Although there was more recent ancestry from England on this side of Jade’s tree, I was once again able to find all the union couples connecting the three match group families fairly quickly. This led to the couple that was Jade’s other set of grandparents who lived in the same region Jade was born in.

This couple had only three daughters, which helped immensely as I now knew that Parent 1 was Jade’s maternal side. This meant that the man from the Parent 2 side was Jade’s biological father since he had no brothers. It also meant that Jade and Harris were maternal half siblings and shared a biological mother.

One of the three daughters of the couple had died a few years ago, and she was in her early twenties when Jade was born, so I reasoned that Jade’s biological mother was one of the younger two daughters- likely the youngest one, based on order in family obituaries and knowledge Jade had of her biological mother’s approximate age. I looked everywhere on social media and in newspapers for them, but was unable to find the two sisters online. I did find two maternal first cousins of Jade on Facebook, and sent her the links to their profiles.

Jade reached out to one of her cousins, who was able to help right away and knew who her (and Harris’) biological mother was and offered put her in touch. My instincts were right and it was indeed the youngest of the three sisters. She also reached out to her biological father.

This search, from the start to when Jade contacted her cousin, took mere hours, and Jade is very pleased to have her answers and looks forward to learning more about her family on both sides in the future .