Mackenna’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Mackenna’s biological father

Mackenna reached out for help with the search for her biological father after her half second cousin match had connected us. She knew who her biological mother was, and had some details about her biological father from non-identifying information, but needed some help identifying him.

Mackenna had done an AncestryDNA test and added me as a collaborator to her results. She recognized some matches from her maternal side, so I was able to assign her matches into sides and figure out which matches were paternal.

Mackenna’s paternal matches were not very close at all, with the top one being around 115cm. From looking at Mackenna’s ethnicity estimate, I could tell that her biological father was going to be 50% German Mennonite, and 50% Greek- a rather unique mix. This was noticeably different from the ethnicity he was described as in Mackenna’s non-identifying information paperwork, which I figured was probably describing someone else entirely. 

I figured the next best step to do was to figure out which of bio dad’s parents were which. To do this, we’d need to find X matches or use a chromosome browser. I asked Mackenna to upload to Gedmatch, in hopes there would be matches there that would help.

A few days later, Mackenna’s results were in on Gedmatch and immediately I could see several German Mennonite matches that were X matches with Mackenna- this was great to see, since that showed that Mackenna’s paternal grandmother was going to be the German Mennonite grandparent, and her paternal grandfather would be Greek.

As well, Mackenna’s second highest Gedmatch match was a man named Ian who had tested on MyHeritage and then uploaded to Gedmatch, so it was a new match to us. She matched him just over 200cm. Ian was an X DNA match, which was also good news, because I knew we’d only have to look at Ian’s maternal side of his tree. 

I built out Ian’s tree to his maternal grandparents, thinking we would not likely have to go beyond that since they were born in the late 1800s, and then started building the trees back downward. Eventually, I found a first cousin of Ian’s that had moved from the prairies to the west coast (where Mackenna’s was born), and married a Greek man. They had several children together, including three sons who were all in the right age range to be Mackenna’s biological father. 

As I started searching for more information about the three sons, I found a newspaper article about one of them from the year before Mackenna was born, describing him as working in a very specific occupation at the same workplace that Mackenna’s biological mother worked at. With this, I figured we had likely found Mackenna’s biological father. 

Mackenna reached out to her presumed paternal uncle who helped put her in touch with her biological father. He had not known about her but was overjoyed to learn he had a daughter. Mackenna looks forward to getting to know him as well as other relatives on her paternal side.