Lessons for Adoptees with Unknown Parentage
I was sharing the story of finding my birth father with the local DNA interest group I am part of and one of the members suggested I share it with the local genealogical society, so I wanted to write something coherent for not only them, but anyone who wants to understand the strategies that were used in finding my biological father, especially when a “case” does not fit the typical DNA strategy. The lessons that follow are assuming that the adoptee has their DNA in all of the following already: Ancestry DNA, 23 and Me, Family Tree DNA, My Heritage and Gedmatch. When I was first learning genetic genealogy, it was stressed to me that the goal was to find common ancestors amongst two or more DNA matches and then, that would lead one to conclude that if two DNA matches share the common ancestor, then you do to. Unfortunately, that strategy never worked for me because I have a father who was a very recent immigrant. For years, I never had anything closer than a 4 t...