Jayna’s search

*All names have been changed

Search goal: Identify Jayna’s biological father

Jayna reached out for help earlier this year with her search for her biological father. She was adopted, and although she had found her biological mother’s side, her bio mother was deceased and not able to assist with the search. Jayna had some non identifying information about her biological father, including that he was from Ontario and had one brother. She had also DNA tested with MyHeritage.

Jayna invited me to her results on MyHeritage and I got started. Her entire maternal side was Acadian, so it was easy to see which matches were maternal. However, she did not have many paternal matches, let alone close ones, on MyHeritage.

The top paternal match on MyHeritage was a lady named Enid, just over 100cm. She was from Ontario and had a small tree that showed all her grandparents were born in Ireland or Northern Ireland. Her shared matches with Jayna were all fairly low so I wasn’t able to determine with shared matches which of her grandparent lines was going to be the one of interest.

I started building out Enid’s maternal grandmother’s line as her maternal grandmother had family in Toronto and that seemed like a good place to start. I just kept building the tree out and down, looking for a family that fit the details of Jayna’s non identifying information.

Eventually I found that Enid’s grandmother had a first cousin named Nancy who had come to Canada, married a man named Leroy Hayes and had only two sons. These two sons were around the right age to be Jayna’s biological father.

Of course, I needed to know Jayna had DNA matches from Leroy’s side, so I searched the Hayes last name in her MyHeritage matches and found two matches that were descended from two of Leroy’s Hayes great uncles. These two matches were not matches to any of Jayna’s maternal matches, so I knew they had to be paternal matches.

Nancy and Leroy’s sons were named Gregory and Harvey. Gregory had passed away a few years ago, and Harvey was still alive. After some deeper research into the two brothers and comparing what we found with Jayna’s non-identifying information, we were both very confident that Gregory was Jayna’s biological father. His nickname was also the masculine version of Jayna’s name, amongst numerous other details that fit and matched.

Despite the matches not being that close, it was still able to come together quite quickly, and Jayna was very pleased to know the identity of her biological father and to be able to build her paternal side of her tree.