*All names have been changed
Search goal: Identify Eliza’s biological parents
Eliza reached out looking for help identifying and locating her biological parents. She had her biological mother’s full name, as well as AncestryDNA test results. Eliza sent me what she had, as well as a collaborator invite to her results, and I got to work.
Eliza had already correctly assigned her Parent 1 / Parent 2 sides as maternal and paternal, so I got to work on the maternal side first.
Her maternal matches split into three main groups:
-One group connected by the last name Saunders, which was her biological mother’s last name
-One group connected by the last name Hansen
-A third small group that had very recent ancestry from the Netherlands, which I was unable to find a last name for.
Eliza’s top maternal match was in the 140cm range, so the matches weren’t super close, but I didn’t have to look at too many family trees before I found the Saunders-Hansen union couple that connected the two families. From there, I looked at their children, reading obituaries and trying to find one of the Saunders that had married a woman who had maybe been born in the Netherlands. Although I wasn’t able to find the marriage, I did find an obituary of the man I figured was Eliza’s maternal grandfather. His obituary named Eliza’s biological mother, and from there it was very easy to find her on Facebook and confirm she was the right person.
Eliza’s paternal side was a little more challenging. Her paternal matches split into four groups:
-The group with the closest matches were connected by the last name Rutherford
-Group 2 was Swedish and connected by the last nam Olafson
-Group 3 was connected by the last name Grey
-Group 4 was connected by the last name Watson
Eliza’s top paternal match was in the 600cm range and part of the Rutherford match group. The match, a man named Daniel, had a locked tree and no profile information, and his name wasn’t super uncommon, so I decided to put him aside from now and work on the other Rutherford matches. Eventually I found the next highest matches were first cousins of Daniel, and by using obituaries, was able to find where Daniel fit in the tree. Daniel, unfortunately, was deceased, but I figured based on how closely Eliza was matching him, she had to be descended from Daniel’s mother- who had married a Watson, which tied in match group 4.
Due to the ages of everyone I reasoned that Daniel’s older half sister was going to be Eliza’s paternal grandmother. But she had no known sons- so I figured Eliza’s biological father was possibly an adoptee himself.
I switched gears for a bit and worked on the Grey group as well as the Swedish group, and was able to find the union couple between the two families fairly quickly. I figured Eliza’s paternal grandfather was going to be one of 3 brothers that were the children of the union couple. I still was unsure how I was going to locate an adoptee despite knowing his biological parents.
I decided to search Eliza’s paternal grandmother on MyHeritage to see if anyone had built a tree with her in it there. She was in exactly one MyHeritage tree; and after investigating further, it was a tree built by her son that had been indeed been placed for adoption! Within the tree, I could tell that he had done a DNA test with MyHeritage, which was great news
I sent my findings to Eliza, and she reached out to her biological father. They both uploaded to Gedmatch, so I checked the results there and saw they matched each other at 3500cm – a perfect match for parent and child.
Eliza has connected with both her biological parents and looks forward to learning more in the future.
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