Kellie’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Kellie’s paternal grandfather

Kellie reached out for help with identifying her paternal grandfather. She had done a DNA test for fun and discovered that her dad’s biological father was not the man who raised him- her father had an NPE.

Kellie added me as a collaborator to her results and I got to work. She had lots of matches from her paternal grandmother’s side, so it was easy to split the matches and see which matches were coming from her unknown paternal grandfather’s side. 

The main paternal grandfather match group had a decent amount of matches, but no matches that were very close. The top four matches in this group were all between 50 and 130 centimorgans, but they were decent enough and I began building out the trees for the matches. I quickly found the last name these matches were related through was Rutherford. I found the common ancestors in this group were born in the 1830s/1840s in Ontario, so going back a ways, but knew which of their children’s lines I should be looking at based on Kellie’s top matches.

From there I looked at the siblings of the great grandmother of the top two Rutherford DNA matches. I also started to search Kellie’s matchlist at the same time to find matches from a Rutherford spouse’s side. Eventually, I found what I was looking for: Gerald Rutherford, a grandchild of the common ancestor couple, had married a woman named Maria who was half Swedish and half English. I was able to find several matches from Maria’s side that formed a small match group of their own.

I looked at the children of Gerald and Maria and fortunately they had only one son, who was the right age and living in the same county as Kellie’s paternal grandmother. I knew this son had to be Kellie’s paternal grandfather.

Kellie was pleased with my assistance and glad to have the mystery solved.