DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN'S FAMILY

Something I often have to deal with when finding family members is, relatives who are in complete denial about relationships and DNA results.  In one of my recent cases, this happened twice.  It can be extremely frustrating.  Something that's so obvious and simple to me, might be completely unbelievable and incomprehensible to others.

I was helping an adopted woman named Susan.  She was desperately looking for her birth father.  She's in her sixties, so if there was any hope of him being alive, she needed to find him now.  She knows her birth mother, but she lied about who the father was twice.  DNA made it clear he was not either of the men she said he was.  Susan's DNA match list looked pretty bleak at first.  There were plenty of matches, but they were all low numbers.  Luckily, there was enough data to put together a family tree starting with her great-great grandparents and working backwards.  There were no first or second cousin DNA matches however.

Surprisingly, finding families that married and had children was pretty easy.  Then came some real luck.  Location played an important part in solving this.  Susan knew her mother was from Mansfield, Pennsylvania, but the families I was seeing were all from Ohio.  Every family member lived and died in Ohio, except one man, Ernest Thompson.  He moved to Mansfield, PA.  Next, there was even more luck.  Ernest and his wife had only one child.  That child was a son, James Thompson.

The luck didn't stop there.  Age made things really clear as well.  James Thompson had only two sons.  One was not old enough to be Susan's father.  The other was, Edgar Thompson.  Edgar is our guy.  Easy, right?  This quickly became a problem however.  Edgar is alive and was contacted.  He decided to deny that he had any involvement in this at all.  So, what's next?  I took a close look to see if I could possibly be wrong.  Let's take a look at what I believe is Susan's correct tree.

The next step would be to look at Susan's grandmother, Ella Carter.  As you might have guessed, Susan has plenty of distant DNA matches to Ella's family as well.  More proof that Edgar is our man.  When chatting with the family, they threw every excuse they could at me to try to make this incorrect.  First, they tried saying the father must be Edgar's father, James.  NO!  That can't be possible because there are many matches NOT related to Thompson and Odem.  They are related to Carter and Davidson.

Now it gets kind of amusing.  Their next excuse was...  "Since there's no close DNA matches, the relationship must be more distant.  Susan must be a distant cousin."  LOL!  NO!  The reason there's no close DNA matches is simply because these are small families.  James had no siblings and Ella only had two.  It's makes perfect sense that there's no first or second cousins.

Next, we got into some real stupidity.  I was able to convince the family that James has to be Susan's grandfather.  They were finally on board with this, so it should have been finished, right?  No, they came up with another way out of this.  They said, "There's a whole lot of other people out there named Carter.  We don't know for sure that James didn't have a child with another Carter who was related to Ella."  OMG, are they serious?  Yes, theoretically it is possible that James had a secret affair with someone like Ella's sister and they had a child who was adopted out of the family, and that secret child is Susan's father.  Yes, it's possible, but come on, give me a break!  We are trying to get a family member to do a DNA test to put an end to this madness.

Wait!  There's another part to this story, and it takes place in an unexpected location...

After dealing with the birth father situation, I happened to look at Susan's mother's side of her DNA match list.  If you've read my old blog posts you know that I often say, "You should be able to identify anyone on your list over 400cM."  Susan has a match who was right around 400cM, named Bryan.  She knows her mother's side of her family well, but says she's never heard of Bryan.  I decided to ask how he was related.  I also asked his age.  The generation he's in is important when figuring these things out.  I could clearly see he was matching to the Cranston and Petty families you see in the tree above.  I did notice something odd however, he was not matching to ALL of Susan's Cranston and Petty matches.  Many were missing from the shared matches.  I'd soon find out why.

Bryan finally replied.  He was a bit standoffish.  His responses were never more than one sentence.  I eventually got some good information from him though.  He is only 26 years old!  He was also born in Hawaii!  He knows his mother's Japanese/Hawaiian family, but nothing about his father other than his name, Patrick Malone.  His age makes this DNA match a big deal.  He's likely not going to be in the same generation as Susan, and could even be two generations younger.  Since Susan is not Japanese/Hawaiian, this means a close relative of Susan will be his father...  But Hawaii!  Really?  Her family is all from Pennsylvania and New York.

I asked Susan if she knows a Patrick Malone.  She does not.  I looked at her first cousin's names and marriages and didn't see the name Malone anywhere.  Then, she remembered something.  She has a nephew who lived in Hawaii.  Could he be a connection to this?  What are the odds that another family member would move there?  This is where it all unraveled.

My knowledge of centimorgan numbers made this clear really quickly.  It's not important if you don't understand the numbers, but I'll explain.  If Bryan matches at 400cM, his father would match Susan at about 800cM.  If he's two generations younger, then the number could double again for the next generation.  I suspected Bryan's grandfather could match Susan at something like 1600cM.  That's a typical half-sibling number.  I asked Susan who her half-sibling is.  She said, "Leon Feldman."  I asked who his son is.  She said, "Frank Feldman."  He's the nephew who lived in Hawaii!  So, to summarize all that, Bryan's grandfather is Susan's half-brother, Leon.  Leon's son, Frank, is Susan's half-nephew.  Bryan is Susan's half-grandnephew.  A perfect DNA match!   Finally, the big news...  What this all means is...  Frank is Bryan's father!

Earlier, I mentioned that many of the shared DNA matches did not appear on Bryan's list.  This makes perfect sense now.  He's two generations younger.  With each generation, the weaker matches will start to drop off the list.  For example, someone who is Susan's third cousin will be Bryan's third cousin twice removed.  It's perfectly normal for that relationship to not show up at all.  It's too weak.  I explained everything to Bryan and confirmed some other details.  Surprisingly, Bryan just wasn't getting it!

I asked about the town he lived in.  It was the same town on the same Hawaiian island that Frank lived in.  Frank confirmed he lived there at the time Bryan was born in 1997, and most importantly, the DNA makes perfect sense.  So, I just accidentally found his birth father!  You'd think Bryan would be really excited at this point, right?  The response I got made me want to bang my head against a wall.  He said, "No, that can't be right, my father's name is Patrick Malone."  LOL, here we go again, another person who doesn't want to be related to Susan.  I can understand his lack of knowledge of centimorgans.  Most people don't understand that stuff, but I explained it to him AND we have the right family member on the right Hawaiian Island in the right town at the right time, with the right DNA.  Sorry Bryan, but Patrick Malone doesn't exist, or at least he's not your father, Frank is!

At this point, I didn't even know the name of Bryan's mother.  I asked, and Frank said he remembers her.  So, this is all confirmed.  Unfortunately, Bryan has vanished since this information has been revealed.  That happens sometimes.  People often "chicken out" when they find the information they were looking for, or find out information is different than what is expected.  That's understandable.  I imagine discovering a birth parent for the first time can be scary.  At least now he knows and he can decide what he'd like to do when he's ready.  Or, maybe he'll just choose to keep believing his father is the non-existent Mr. Malone.

Next, find out what happens when everyone in your tree is related to everyone else.