Patricia’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Patricia’s biological mother

Patricia reached out for help recently with the search for identifying her biological mother. Patricia was adopted, and had identifying information about her biological mother from her adoption paperwork.

Patricia had done AncestryDNA and 23andMe tests, which helped her learn the identity of her biological father, who had passed away many decades ago. Patricia suspected many or all the names she had been given about her biological mother and her family were false names, which was making her search very challenging. The names she had were Matilda Teasdale for her biological mother, and Matilda’s parents were supposedly Alvin Teasdale and Georgina Bernstein, all from Nova Scotia. These last names were not showing up in the trees of Patricia’s matches, and Patricia nor the adoption reunion case worker in Quebec could not find anybody with these names, leading her to believing the names were fake.

I started by looking at Patricia’s AncestryDNA results, where she had many maternal matches, with the closest one being just under 250cm. All her maternal matches 90cm and above were from a very endogamous small community in Nova Scotia and were related to each other many ways. Sorting the matches that were 90cm and above into groups did not work as everyone matched each other. I wondered if Patricia’s biological mother’s parents were related in some way.

I also tried to research Matilda and her parents to see if I could find anyone with those names in Nova Scotia, but I was unable to find anyone whose names matched exactly. The closest I got was a young girl named Georgina Bernbaum who had been living with an elderly couple with the MacAdam last name in the 1911 census with no relationship given. While this Georgina was similarly named, I initially wasn’t able to find anything else about her initially.

After a few days of trying to make sense of the large cluster of matches, I decided to really focus on finding matches with big largest segments of DNA shared as these matches would be related to Patricia more closely.

I was going down the list of matches further and further when I came across a match named Mark Stone at 75cm, who had a longest segment of 47cm, which was the biggest longest segment out of all of Patricia’s matches. Intrigued, I looked at Mark and Patricia’s shared matches, and was surprised to see that Mark was the top of a unique group of matches outside the cluster of endogamous NS matches. I was very excited to have found a unique match group and thought this might be the key to solving Patricia’s search.

I started looking at the shared matches between Mark and Patricia, and was surprised to see that the common last name shared between some of the matches was Bernbaum- the same last name as Georgina Bernbaum, who I had spotted in the 1911 census in Nova Scotia with two elderly people.

Intrigued, I started building the family tree down from the Bernbaum common ancestors (who were born in the 1830s), and was amazed to find that Georgina Bernbaum was their granddaughter. Georgina’s mother’s maiden name was MacAdam, and the two people she had been in the same household with in 1911 were her maternal grandparents, who she was visiting.

I started researching Georgina and found that she had married a man named Alvin Cahill in Nova Scotia. Now we had a couple with the same first names as Patricia’s information, and Georgina’s last name was very similar to the last name in the paperwork too. I figured I was really onto something here and these were likely Patricia’s maternal grandparents.

Alvin and Georgina had a few daughters, but only one that lived to adulthood- a daughter named Jane, born in the early 1920s. As I researched Jane, I found that she had moved to Quebec where Patricia was born, and then moved back to Nova Scotia. I also found that she had at least one other daughter, named Emma, that was also placed for adoption before Patricia was born.

I found Jane’s memorial in Nova Scotia on FindAGrave but there was no photo, so I put in a photo request which was fulfilled within a day by a kind volunteer. The headstone listed four children of Jane, one being the daughter I had already found (Emma), and so I went about researching them and trying to find social media profiles for Patricia. Unfortunately, it looked like at least three of the four had already passed away.

Patricia reached out to one of her half nieces, Jessica, who replied pretty quickly and was happy to chat and share what she knew. Jessica mentioned that her late mother did know of another sibling [Patricia] who had been placed for adoption, but they had been unable to find her. She also confirmed that sadly all of Jane’s other children had passed away.

The large cluster of DNA matches I now knew were from Patricia’s biological mother Jane’s own biological father’s side, and her biological father was not her birth certificate father (Alvin Teasdale). Jane had an NPE.

Although the endogamy and the fake names initially seemed very daunting, Patricia’s search ended up being a fairly quick one that only took a couple of days. She is very happy to have her answers and looks forward to learning more about her maternal family soon, including on an upcoming trip to Nova Scotia.