*All names have been changed
Search goal: Identify Tina’s biological father
Tina reached out for her search for her biological father. Tina was adopted, and had recently received her information about her biological families. She had also just gotten her DNA results back, so Tina sent me an invite and I got to work.
Tina had already located a woman on social media who was likely her biological mother, so the focus was to identify her biological father, who she did have a bit of information about.
When I looked at Tina’s AncestryDNA matches, I initially was not sure which parent side was which. She shared that her biological mother was partly French Canadian, and her biological father was Irish, which aligned with her ethnicity estimate results, so I started working on the Irish side first.
Fortunately, this parent side had way more matches. The matches split into four distinct groups, and I got to work figuring out the common last names within each group. They were pretty easy to find due to the matches having good trees. The last names were Murphy, McCarthy, Quinlan and Hayes.
I was able to find the first union couple between the Hayes and Murphy groups which I figured was one set of Tina’s great grandparents based on their age. The families were in lots of trees on Ancestry, so I was able to look through trees and find the families quite easily, with no need to build out trees of the DNA matches.
From there, I worked the next generation down, looking for any children of the union couple that had married someone with the last names McCarthy or Quinlan.
Eventually, I found it- one of the daughters of Murphy/Hayes had had a brief marriage to a man with the last name McCarthy. They had four children together- two boys, and two girls. This aligned with the information Tina had about her biological father’s family.
Of the two boys in the McCarthy family, one was living, and one had passed away several years ago. Based on their ages and the information Tina had, we figured her biological father was the one who had sadly passed away. Despite this, Tina is glad to know who her biological father is and looks forward to learning more about the family.
After this, I worked on the maternal matches Tina had, although they were much more distant, with the top four matches being between 100 and 160cm. Despite this and the big web of Acadian endogamy, I was still able to find her biological mother’s parents and confirm that Tina had indeed located her biological mother. Tina was pleased with my quick work, and I was happy to be able to help her out.
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