Kelsea’s search

*All names have been changed.

Search goal: Identify Kelsea’s biological father

Kelsea reached out for help with identifying her biological father. She was adopted, and although she had found her maternal side, her biological mother had passed away. Kelsea had some non-identifying information about her biological father, and had done an AncestryDNA test.

Kelsea added me as a collaborator to her results and I got to work. I could tell right away that Kelsea’s biological father was going to be fully Finnish as Kelsea was exactly 50%. 

Her paternal matches were fairly sparse, with the top one being just over 250cm, and then there were only two others above 100cm, and the rest were quite distant. I decided to start by looking at the top match, which was a lady named Marla.

Looking at Marla’s ethnicity estimate compared to Kelsea, Marla was only 25% Finnish, indicating that she only had one fully Finnish grandparent.

Marla had no tree, but thankfully she had a unique name. After using obituaries to build out Marla’s tree, I found that her paternal grandmother was the Finnish grandparent. I built out the family further and figured based on everyone’s ages, that Marla was likely a second cousin to Kelsea.

Marla’s father only had one male first cousin, Antero, who was the right age and living in the right town. I found a write up of Antero done in a monthly publication produced by his employer, and it matched Kelsea’s non identifying information quite well.

Kelsea did some digging too and discovered Antero was living in the same building as her biological mother was, right before she was born. The case for Antero being Kelsea’s biological father grew!

Kelsea’s eventually got in contact with Marla’s father who confirmed he only had one male cousin- Antero- and that what we knew of Antero matched Kelsea’s information. He agreed Antero was very likely to be Kelsea’s biological father. Antero passed away many decades ago, and had no siblings or children, so while it can’t be confirmed further with DNA, Kelsea is confident Antero was her biological father.