Genetic Genealogy SIG

A DNA Search Success Story

I just received this email from Cheryl (a member of The Villages Genealogical Society and our Genetic Genealogy Special Interest Group) and her husband, Richard. Something I said while explaining AncestryDNA’s shared DNA feature at our February meeting set into motion a chain of events with a very successful outcome. I’ll let them tell the story.

The Email:

“Hi Jim,

We are now back in Minnesota.

This was our 3rd year wintering in The Villages, and every year we learn so much!  We did our DNA through Ancestry a couple of years ago, but didn’t really understand much until this year when we attended one of your DNA SIG meetings.

We are definitely DNA newbies, but the first meeting we attended (February), you were talking about “centimorgans” and how to find that.  We had NEVER even heard the word, let alone seen a place to find that number.

So, we got very busy checking some of our matches.  My husband, Richard, finally looked at his in early March 2017, and there was one match that was kind of shocking.  My matches were either people I knew or 4th cousins or more, but Richard had one that said “Close family – 1st cousins.”  So, he dropped her a short email through Ancestry.  We didn’t hear back from her until we were already on our journey back home, but within two days we had a pretty amazing answer.

Back story – Richard is adopted.  In 1981, through more traditional means, he found his birth mother, they met, and he met his maternal 1/2 siblings.  His birth parents never married, and by the time Richard met Birth Mom, Birth Father had already passed away (1967.)  So, he just took the information he gathered from his birth mom and figured that door was shut.

Well, after contacting this high match person just a couple weeks ago, it turns out that she is Richard’s birth father’s daughter!!   (Trying to find that out was tricky…Richard didn’t want to let a 70 year old cat out of the bag since he didn’t think his birth father even knew about him)  There were a few emails back and forth that gently nudged information out before we just blurted the news to the world.

This is all really new – only happened a couple of days ago, but the amazing thing is that she said both she and her older sister knew there was a brother out there and one of the reasons she did the DNA test was in hopes of finding him!

So, we just wanted to thank you, and share this amazing story with you.  If we hadn’t learned about “centimorgans” and the meaning of the various numbers, this hint might have gone by without checking – at least for awhile.  The initial email was set to her on March 12, she answered for the first time on March 29, and after a week, they now know they are siblings, and they seem very excited to have found their brother!  I have attached jpeg files of the centiMorgans and the initial hint.

Thank you for sharing your wealth of information, and giving us the one key we needed to unlock this family story.

Cheryl & Richard”

 

A DNA search success story! Now THAT’S what I’m talking about!