Cara’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Cara’s biological father

Cara reached out for help recently with her search. Cara had done an AncestryDNA test and discovered the father that raised her was not her biological father- she had an NPE, as many discover they do after testing.

Cara had spoken with her mother about this revelation, who said that the only possibility for Cara’s father was a man named John Teasdale. Cara needed some help understanding her matches and determining if John really was her biological father, or if it was someone else.

Cara added me as a collaborator to her AncestryDNA results and I got to work. She had lots of known matches from her maternal side, so it was easy to see which matches were paternal. I grouped the paternal matches into four distinct groups, likely each representing a great grandparent of Cara’s on her paternal side. She had one match around 450cm, and the rest were under 200cm.

As I went through the trees of the first paternal match group, I noticed that the common last name of this match group was indeed Teasdale, which was good to see as it indicated Cara’s mother was likely telling the truth. I found the common ancestors of the Teasdale match group and started working back down the tree. I narrowed it down fairly quickly to the set of siblings that Cara’s Teasdale grandparent would be from, and started to find obituaries online, hoping one would name John as a son.

Cara also shared that her mother had mentioned John had an older brother and a younger sister, so I kept that in mind as I searched. Eventually I found an obituary for a Wallace Teasdale, whose obituary named John as a son along with an older son as well as a younger daughter and son.

From a little bit of research I had done on Ancestry, I knew Wallace had been married twice, and that his children were all from his first wife. I wanted to confirm that John was the right man we were looking for and find his mother’s side. So I started searching newspapers and eventually found birth announcements for Wallace’s children. This gave me the full maiden name of John’s mother, and with that, I knew we had found the right man, as his mother’s maiden name was Jette and that was the common last name of the match group that included the 450cm match.

John was a little harder to find online as his real last name was fairly common, but Cara did some outreach on Facebook as well as to some of her Ancestry matches, and within two days, Cara had made positive contact with her biological father as well as a half sibling. She is happy to have confirmed the identity of her biological father and looks forward to learning more about that side of her family tree.