Sylvie’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Sylvie’s biological mother

Sylvie reached out for help with her search. I had helped her paternal half sister Pamela three years ago, and Pamela and their other sister Trisha suggested Sylvie reach out to me for help. Sylvie was adopted and hoping to identify her biological mother. Sylvie did not know anything about her biological mother. All she knew was her birth last name- Rockwell.

Sylvie’s paternal side was known already thanks to her half sisters testing, so it made her maternal matches very easy to see. Right away, I could tell that Sylvie’s maternal side was going to have some ancestry from an Acadian part of New Brunswick. The endogamy was intense. 

Very similarly to Patricia’s search from earlier this year, I tried to sort the maternal matches and just came up with one big group due to the endogamy. Many matches were related multiple ways. Sylvie’s maternal matches were also not very close, with the top one being just 158cm. 

I decided to try my strategy that I used for Patricia’s search and look at the largest longest segment lengths of the maternal matches. I started to copy everyone’s name and and their centimorgan number and longest segment length onto a spreadsheet, making note of every match that had a longest segment of 40 or more. 

Eventually a ways down the list, I found a match named Lana that shared 103cm with Sylvie. Her longest segment was not above 40, but when I was checking her shared matches, to my surprise she did not match anyone from the Acadian cluster. 

Lana was the top of her own small maternal match group. Per her tree, all four of her grandparents were born in Scotland. This was interesting. I started to wonder if perhaps Sylvie’s biological mother had one Scottish parent and one Acadian parent. 

I continued to look at the shared matches between Lana and Sylvie and eventually found the common ancestors of the match group were born in the 1820s in Scotland. I started looking through the trees and working back down the tree. Eventually I found a granddaughter of the common ancestor couple that had married a Rockwell, which was interesting as that was Sylvie’s birth last name, and not a last name I had seen in the Acadian trees. 

I started to research the family and tried to find out if they had any sons that had come to Canada. Sure enough, after a lot of research, I eventually found what I was looking for thanks to the New Brunswick Vital Statistics index. The granddaughter of the common ancestor couple had one son named William Rockwell who came to New Brunswick from Scotland. He married an Acadian woman whose families all lined up with the Acadian matches Sylvie had.

William and his wife only had one daughter, which made it very easy to determine who Sylvie’s biological mother was. I was able to find her easily on social media and presented the information to Sylvie, who was amazed at my quick findings.

Initially, this was looking to be another tough search, but once again the longest segment strategy ended up making it very easy in the end. 

Sylvie is glad to know more about her maternal side of her biological family tree.