I have been actively working on three adoptees and one birth mother cases looking for their biological family. This week alone I have built at least two family trees with over a combined seven hundred family members on ancestry.com. Unfortunately, it has not yet linked up with the clues available to us thus far. Yet my hopes are high that I can help each one of them.

Although it may feel like a setback that instant results are not presenting themselves, it’s really not that uncommon to spend months, if not longer, trying to find the connections.

I turn into a machine on some of these ancestry.com deep dives. It’s important to backup each hint with actual documentation to substantiate the truth behind each match. Here is an example. One tree has three-hundred-forty-seven people on it, with eight-hundred-twenty records backing them up.

It’s a process, but I’ve seen new clues surface over time and make the whole effort worth it. The trick is not to take hints and accept them as reality, but instead be willing to take a hint, then prove it. If it cannot be proven with more documentation than you have to be willing to delete the hint, and the faulty document that may be associated to someone else.

The motivation is doubled by the fact that we are attempting to find birth family members. The added benefit is, that when/if we can establish the actual biological family you usually have built out a substantial tree that fills in not only immediate family members, but multiple generations.