Janette’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Janette’s biological father

Janette reached out for help identifying her biological father. Janette had never known the identity of her biological father and was curious about his side. Interestingly, she had always been told that she looked like the family of the man who raised her, and throughout her life had even been mistaken for her “first cousin” on her dad’s side. However, after doing DNA testing, there seemed to be no apparent connections to her father’s family.

Janette had done an AncestryDNA test, so she invited me to her results as a collaborator and I got to work. Her paternal matches split into two main groups: the Ferguson family group and the McKinnon family group.

I was able to easily identify the common ancestors for each family group, and I figured these common ancestor couples would be Janette’s two sets of paternal grandparents. I researched their children, looking for a marriage or other connection between the Ferguson and McKinnon families, but found no obvious connection between the two families. At this point, I also reviewed Janette’s 23andMe results to try to fit more matches into both the Ferguson and McKinnon family trees.

Janette had some decent top matches from each group, and I suspected that her top matches were half first cousins to Janette on both the Ferguson and McKinnon sides. These matches, along with others, pointed to two people who were both a child of each of the common ancestor couples: Robert McKinnon and Minnie Ferguson. These two were likely Janette’s paternal grandparents.

At this point, I figured Janette’s biological father was likely going to have an NPE of his own. It made more sense for Minnie Ferguson’s sons to have been fathered by Robert McKinnon than for one of Robert’s sons to have had a different mother than his wife. Both families lived in the same area.

I started researching Minnie Ferguson’s two sons- both had passed away. To my surprise, one of Minnie’s sons, Walter, had been married to the sister of the man who raised Janette. I started to wonder if Walter might actually be Janette’s biological father.

I presented this information to Janette, who was surprised as well, but it also made a lot of sense to her. The “cousin” she had always been mistaken for was potentially a half-sibling or a half first cousin!

Eventually, Walter’s daughter did a DNA test and matched Janette in the half-sibling range, confirming that Janette’s biological father was Walter. Janette is glad to finally know more about her biological paternal family.