Moriah’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Moriah’s biological mother

Moriah reached out for help with her search for her biological mother. Moriah had already identified her biological father, who was deceased, and was in contact with her paternal half sisters. Moriah had her original birth registration, which stated her biological mother’s name- Anne Black- although Moriah suspected this was a false name. Moriah had also done DNA testing with various companies, including AncestryDNA.

Moriah added me as a collaborator to her AncestryDNA results and I got to work. One of Moriah’s paternal half sisters had also done an AncestryDNA test, which made it easy to see which matches were paternal and which were maternal.

I sorted Moriah’s maternal matches into three main groups. Once I sorted the matches into the three groups, I went through the trees of the matches to determine the common last name the matches in each group were related by.

• The first match group was connected by the last names Thornton and Jennings
• The second match group was connected by the last name McCarthy
• The third match group was connected by the last name McPherson

No match groups had the last name Black, which made me agree with Moriah that her biological mother’s name on her birth registration was probably a false name. 

As I looked through the matches’ trees and started building the trees out, I found that the common ancestors of the groups were quite a ways back- back to the early 1800s and into the 1830s- quite a ways back in time. They had come from various countries in the United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales) to Canada, and I could tell all of the match groups had ancestors that lived in Huron County in Ontario. I figured Moriah’s biological mother was likely going to be from Huron County as well or have recent ancestry from that part of the province. 

At the same time, I started researching Moriah’s top maternal match, a man named Daniel who matched her around 230cm. He was part of the Thornton/Jennings group. Daniel did not have a tree or any information on his profile. However, he did have a fairly distinct full name, and I figured he would likely have roots in Huron County. So I started researching Daniel and quickly found obituaries for people that I presumed were his parents, who were from Huron County. 

I began building Daniel’s tree further up, and found where he connected to the Thornton/Jennings couple- they were his third great grandparents. 

Because Daniel was such a decent match, around the second cousin range, I figured I wouldn’t be looking too far to find the connection between him and Moriah. 

Daniel was related to Moriah via his paternal grandmother Nora’s line, so I started looking at Nora’s siblings. Nora luckily only had a few siblings, so it was quick work. I noticed Nora had a brother named John Draycott who had married a woman named Alice McCarthy. Right away that got me excited as McCarthy was another one of Moriah’s match group last names. 

I took a closer look at Alice McCarthy and found that her mother’s maiden name was McPherson, which tied in the third match group name.

I figured I was getting close and that one of John Draycott and Alice McCarthy’s children was going to be the biological mother of Moriah. 

After finding some obituaries, it turned out they only had two daughters- one named Celia, who had died in 2020, and another daughter, Elaine, who appeared to be still alive.

Further research determined that Elaine had been married in the 1950s and was busy raising four children by the time Moriah was born. Celia however appeared to have never married and was quite hard to track down after the late 1960s.

Celia’s middle name was also spelt Nadene, which was notable because Moriah’s middle name was spelt Moriah Francene on her birth registration- a rather distinct way of spelling both names. 

Based on the DNA and the name spelling allusion, I concluded that Celia had to be Moriah’s biological mother. Just days after presenting this information to Moriah, she met some of her biological relatives and was able to learn more about Celia from them. After decades of searching, Moriah is glad to finally have answers about her biological maternal side of her family.