Randi contacted me for help finding her unknown biological father. I advised her to test at Ancestry and get back in touch when her results were ready.

When they came in, it took only three hours to find Randi’s unknown biological dad! She had two second cousin level matches at Ancestry with good trees who did not match each other. That meant that the search would likely be easy, since all I had to do was find where those two trees intersected. Here is how I did that, step by step.

First I created a private searchable tree at Ancestry to use for this case. I started it with Randi and her mom. planning to make floating branches for related people by copying the relevant lines over from their trees.

The best DNA match on Randi’s unknown father’s side was Brad at 322 cM. So using ProTools, I sorted the matches Randi and he shared by his closest matches, as shown in the image below.

Clicking on the sort button brings up a box where you can select to sort by the match’s relationship

The idea was to find the common ancestor among those matches. This would be the line that Randi is related on. To do that, I should have looked at the best one with a tree, excluding close family, but I saw that there was one a bit further down the list, Bob, who had an unusual surname, call it Roper, that was the same as one of Brad’s great grandmothers. So I built her tree back up a few generations and down again. I then copied Bob’s paternal ancestors over, looking for an intersection. I did not find one, so I moved on. Later Brad told me that the error was two women with the same name and birth year incorrectly in various trees, including his.

So I went back to the common match list and found the best match to Brad with a tree (Peggy). One of her grandmothers shared a surname, call it Whistler, with the husband of the Roper great grandmother. So I built the Whistler tree. Quickly found a common ancestor for Peggy and Brad with an unusual first name born in 1830. Built the tree of all his descendants. Somewhere in that tree will be our man.

Time to look at the other possible second cousin match, Jim, at 268 cM. The plan was to repeat the process of finding the common ancestor to his best match with a tree. However, his surname, call it Wander, had already showed up in the Whistler tree. Having collected all the descendants of Brad’s Whistler great grandparents, I noticed that one of them had married a Wander. Was that Wander in Jim’s tree? Yes, she was his aunt!

That Whistler-Wander couple, who must be Randi’s ancestors, had two children, a boy and a girl. The boy was the right age and in the right location. Could it really be this easy? Yes. The details of his life fit what was known. Since Randi’s presumed father is Jim’s first cousin, Jim is Randi’s first cousin once removed.

part of the WATO hypothesis

To further confirm this, I built a Whistler WATO model and added a few more of the matches. Other tasks done for Randi: I used Newspapers.com to find her bio dad’s obituary and learn more about her new half siblings. I sent Randi contact information from BeenVerified for her new half brothers. I also wrote nice notes to Brad and Jim thanking them for their good trees and telling them about their new cousin. I asked what they knew about Randi’s dad. I also offered to share the tree I had built with them. Amazingly they both responded later that day! Another first!

Here are a few other things I do. I put the initials of the match whose ancestor it is in the suffix field for that person in my working tree. Hints and ThruLines both seem to ignore the suffix so there are no bad side effects. Doing this makes it easy for me to retrace my steps and see the relationships. For example, Brad is the BA shown in the WATO chart above. I also put the size of the match within asterisks in the suffix of that person in our tree, so Brad got a *322*. Another tip is to keep checking the tree for duplicates, an automated way to discover where what you copied intersects with the tree you already have,

Both of the good matches responded and had some information about the Whistler family. Now it is up to Randi to contact her half brothers, who likely know nothing about her existence. I gave her the advice from the DNA-adoption site on that (click here). I am still amazed at how quickly this was solved, maybe Randi should buy a lottery ticket! Or maybe this is because there are just so many testers in the USA these days.

[no real names were used in this article]