I have been remiss in posting weekly writings about the people in my family tree, but spring arrived and the outside beckoned. I hope to get back to these people and their stories in the near future. For now, I will write about my current weekend and how I have spent it.
It is a beautiful, warm Manitoba weekend and I am at home by myself while my husband is on his annual fishing trip with our sons. My plan for the weekend was to clean the house and enjoy the cleanliness lasting the whole weekend. I also planned to start on a sewing project I have wanted to work on for the last couple of weeks. All my plans have been sidelined.
Yesterday, I received a phone call and an email inviting me to help two people search for the bio father for the grandmother of someone they know (I will call her LP). LP was born in Canada in the first part of the last century. She was raised by her bio mother and her mother told her the surname of her bio father. LP has submitted her DNA sample to Ancestry and there are two close matches that are interesting because they do not match her mother’s family tree. The interesting matches are #1 at 844 centimorgans (a unit for measuring genetic linkage) and #2 at 297 centimorgans. This means #1 is a close relative and possibly a first cousin and #2 is also a close relative and possibly a second cousin. #2 has the same surname in their tree that LP was told was her bio father’s surname.
This is all it takes to get me on board to start searching and put my weekend plans aside. Some may say I have wasted the weekend, but to me, this is an amazing way to spend a weekend. I love the search and I love to find people and documents to support they belong to the family so the family tree can be expanded. This is one of the best puzzles there is to work on.
For the purpose of looking for a biological parent, one must first determine the closest DNA matches that are possibly related to that parent. If the DNA match has attached a family tree to their DNA results then a Mirror Tree needs to be completed. A Mirror Tree is exactly as it sounds; you copy all the information from your DNA match’s tree to one you will now work on and you add the DNA results to a person in that tree. The Mirror Tree should be made private and not searchable because it is considered a theory and should not be made public until you can prove the theory. The Mirror Tree needs to be researched and you need to attach new members to the tree as you find documents to support they belong to the family. As you add new people to the tree you are looking for “shaky” tree hints which inform you that another person’s DNA matches to someone in your expanding tree. This information can help narrow done the tree branch that you need to work on because if the new DNA match only belongs to one branch of the family then that is the branch you will now focus on. An example of this; if you have a tree with 16 great-great-grandparents and you are focusing on finding information about all their descendants than you will end up with a very large tree that will be hard to determine possible bio fathers. As you expand the tree out by adding descendants and ancestors and a hint arrives that matches with someone that has married into only one branch of the 16 great-great-grandparents then you have narrowed down your search from eight branches of these couples to one and that is the branch you will focus on expanding in hopes to narrow it to one of four couples of great-grandparents and then one branch of two grandparent couples and so on.
Back to LP – match #1 did not have a tree associated with their results and match #2 had a tree with only five people. One of the collaborators I am working with had already found people to confidently add to this Mirror Tree so that it had grown from five people to 49 by the time I was invited. In just over a day the three of us have grown the tree to 170 people. As we grow this tree we are eagerly waiting for “shaky” tree hints to appear so that we can narrow our search to fewer and fewer branches until we have narrowed it down to just a few possible males that may be the bio father. At that point we will hope to reach out to descendants of those males in hopes they will do a DNA test to help confirm one of the males is the bio father and/or to rule out which males are not the bio father.
This can be a very slow process and is determined by the quality and quantity of documents available to allow us to expand the tree and also by the number of DNA samples that are matching to this Mirror Tree with family trees available to review. I previously used DNA matches and a Mirror Tree to search for a bio father and it took 16 months to reach a conclusion. I worked on it with my daughter and got her hooked on genealogy. We started with a 79-person tree from a close match (second cousin) and grew it to 1,238 people. We were able to narrow our search to one of four brothers. We determined brother #1 was the most likely bio father because he lived in the same place as the bio mother. This fact alone was not enough evidence to support our findings so we had to reach out to family and ask for DNA samples. Brother #1 was not known to have ever married and did not appear to have any children. Brothers #2, #3 and #4 did marry and had descendants. We reached out to an owner of an Ancestry public tree that had these four people in their tree. She was very helpful in contacting descendants of brothers #2, #3 and #4 and getting them to submit their DNA. The matches came back and due to the amount of the centimorgan match we were able to rule out brothers #2, #3 and #4 leaving brother #1 as the bio father. This provided us with a confident conclusion to our theory.
If you love puzzles, you may want to try genealogy. It is never ending, can be frustrating when you hit roadblocks, but also exhilarating when you find an obscure document that fills in blanks that no one else appears to have found. You will find the people you are working on come to life and you will wish you could meet some of them to ask them questions about their lives and decisions. Our forefathers and foremothers brought us to where we are and our decisions will help blaze the trail for our descendants.
Now time to return to searching for LP’s bio father.