For me it is rare to see an adopted mother help her adopted son look for birth family. However, that is the case with one of my searches. Last night I took a look at the clues and worked with the closest DNA relatives; a third cousin.
At this level, I usually go a few dozen steps in and take a break because it really does not show promise that quickly. Although the family tree I was working from was a public member tree on Ancestry.com directly from the DNA relative.
The tree of the third cousin was actually missing quite a lot. It appeared as if they had taken the most direct route to the male and female generations. Not even bothering to fill out the rest of the siblings and children along the way. So in our new tree I filled them out as thoroughly as I could.
I worked on it in the early hours of the morning, and then came back to it later in the evening after my day job. About an hour into the evening I found the surname of the adoptees birth parent. I was a little surprised, but I set the 3rd cousin as the home person on the tree and measured the distance. It was close; I mean, really close to where it ought to be.
The tree needed one or two more generations towards the present day era. So I took it up until I started to see living relatives, but hit a brick wall for names and marriages, as the living tend to have that affect on records that can, or should I say, cannot be found.
The generation in the present was too far away; closer to 4th cousin, and the generation before that was too old to be the parents. So I stopped and created a fake relative and named it after the adoptee; then gave it the stats of their year born and the State they were born in.
The biggest key here was there were at least three generations of family with this surname all living in the very same State as the adoptee had been born in. That’s pretty unusual. Normally I am used to seeing birth mother’s being sent away to another State to have their children, but here was one that appeared to put their child up for adoption in the same State they lived in. That is how it seems for the moment. I cannot be sure, until I allow the DNA kit that was attached to this adoptee sit within that tree for a day or two.
The problem I face is that the tree I based it on was actually not great. That third cousin assembled a half rate tree and I would have had to made mistakes to make them both match perfectly. So it is unlikely that the third cousin DNA and tree will actually show up as a match.
The other problem with this DNA test is that the very next step out on the cousin level is 4th cousins. That means making this tree a lot bigger just to bump into distant cousins genetically. Considering I’ve only put in a day on this tree and have over one hundred and twenty-five people in it, with a potential surname match, is a bit of a shock. I’m expecting this to actually prove to be much harder than it initially appears.