Meg’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Meg’s biological father

Meg reached out for help with identifying her biological father. She was adopted and had reunited with her biological mother many years ago. She had given Meg two possible names for her biological father- Richard Yates or Stanley Watson.

Meg had recently done an AncestryDNA test in hopes of finding out which man was her biological father. They both had very common names and while Meg suspected Richard Yates might be her father after a brief look at her match list, she wanted some help to confirm it and then either locate him or an obituary if he was not alive anymore.

Meg added me as a collaborator and I got to work. Her maternal matches were known already, so it was easy to see which ones were paternal. She had a fairly close top paternal match named Kris who looked to be a first cousin. Kris had a parent with the Yates last name, so that was good to see.

I reviewed the shared matches between Meg and Kris and confirmed that Meg had matches from both parental lines of Kris’s Yates parent, indicating that Kris was indeed a first cousin.

Next I looked at obituaries of Kris’s grandparents, and they had many children including a son named Richard. After a bit of searching, I was able to find the obituary of Richard who had unfortunately passed away over a decade ago. Richard had two other children who I found on Facebook and provided their profile links to Meg.

Meg was happy to have her biological father’s identity confirmed and looks forward to learning more about the paternal side of her tree.