You've hired the pros to find your biological family member. Now here's a list of ways YOU can help make your unknown parentage case a success.
Congratulations! You’ve given this a lot of thought, and you’re ready to find your birth parents. You know this is a big job, so you’ve asked Legacy Tree Genealogists to help. We’re on it, and we can’t wait to get started.
Here’s a secret, though: A lot of our success here is going to depend on you. We’ve helped a lot of people, and we feel like we’re pretty good at this, but we still need your help. There’s a lot you can do to make sure we find your biological parents as efficiently as possible. Here are seven ways you can make sure we’re successful together:
Tell us who these cousin matches are.
It’s likely that you’ve already taken a number of DNA tests before you begin working with us. That means you’ve seen your cousin match list. We’re going to see that list too, and our first task is to figure out who those people are. There’s no way to find your unknown parent without those cousins, so we absolutely have to identify them. That means you can preserve valuable research time by telling us everything you know about these people. If you’ve already corresponded with them, send us those notes. If you recognize Myrtle as your mother’s second cousin, don’t keep it a secret. If you’ve sent them five messages and haven’t heard a peep back, that’s okay. We have ways of working around that, but we need to know every detail about what you’ve done first. Without that information, we might spend time uncovering facts you already know, and that’s frustrating for everyone concerned.
Test everyone related to your case.
If you’re looking for your father, and your mother is still living and willing to take a DNA test, we may ask you to have your mother take a DNA test. Doing so will allow us to quickly eliminate maternal cousins, so we spend all of our research time on your dad’s family. If your mother isn’t available, a maternal aunt or your half-sibling can test as well. Even testing a first cousin can help save time by eliminating matches from consideration. Learn more about how testing additional individuals can help resolve your case in our article, Covering Your Bases: Introduction to Autosomal DNA Coverage.
Test everywhere.
DNA tests have become much less expensive over the years. That means that tests aren’t the place to economize, because more cousin matches mean we’ll need fewer research hours to solve your case. We occasionally find we can solve a case with matches from just one site, but it’s rare. More often, we use results from multiple DNA sites to solve unknown parentage cases. Most sites have sales around World DNA Day (25 April), Mother’s Day and Father’s Day (mid-May and mid-June in the United States), and the period from mid-November to Christmas. If you’re looking for recent ancestry in Europe, it’s especially important to test at MyHeritage DNA, which has a rapidly-growing database of European clients (yes, even in Germany!).
During the research phase, find another hobby.
It’s tempting to continue to contact cousin matches or take the information from case updates and put them in your shiny new public family tree. We love this kind of work, so we get it. Jumping ahead can sometimes spook the cousins we still need to correspond with, and that can really bring research to a screeching halt. Sit tight and let us do our thing, and when we’re done, you’ll have tons of fun new material to work with. If you see something new that you think we should be aware of right away, it’s fine to email your project manager and make sure they’ve seen it. In fact, if a cousin you contacted months ago finally responds, be sure to let us know. We get responses from years-old cases, so “better late than never” is part of our daily work.
Tell us about the parent you know.
Unknown parentage cases sometimes involve finding just one parent, not two. If you’ve already identified one biological parent, we need to know every detail about that person. What was her address? Where did she work or go to school? What did her parents do for a living? What kinds of activities was she into? These details can make or break your case. Your parents intersected at some point, and we frequently see cases where they lived on the same street, worked in the same factory, or attended the same school. Sometimes their parents were in the same profession, and the parents met at the company picnic (true story!). You may think it’s strange that we want the name of the obstetrician who delivered you, but it may turn out that he’s the uncle of your birth father (another true story!). Tiny details matter a great deal when it comes to solving unknown parentage cases.
Sometimes, this step can be the most difficult part of the whole process. Parents are people, and people are imperfect. You might know some facts about your parent that are not fun to share, because they’re not things that make you feel proud. We get it. Our relatives aren’t perfect either, and we do this sort of work for a living. That means we’ve seen a lot, and we’re not here to judge you or your family. If the parent you’ve already identified had a complicated life, please tell us. We just want to help you solve your case, and information is our biggest weapon in breaking down brick walls that stand between you and the answers you need.
Share your hunches with us.
Did you spot a packet of old letters from a guy named Bob in your mom’s sock drawer when you were 12? Tell us. Bob is a common name, but when we get to the point where we’ve found your grandparents and they had three sons, the fact that one of them was named Bob might suddenly seem very important. Family secrets are often not all that secret, except from the child in question. If you heard whispers, or Aunt Martha thinks your father might have been missing a thumb, or your cousin says she heard something about a guy who worked at Dairy Queen, let us know. Those little details can save a lot of time in solving your case, because they help us narrow the field of possible candidates.
Don’t cling too tightly to what you “know.”
It’s important that we’re aware of that bit about the letters from Bob in your mom’s sock drawer, because that might matter. On the flip side, it might just be a pile of letters from a guy named Bob. Don’t discount any possibility just because it doesn’t fit with what you’ve been told in the past. Your Aunt Martha might be absolutely certain that your dad was Bob with the Missing Thumb, but DNA knows more than your Aunt Martha does. Sometimes the DNA evidence leads us in a direction that is very different from the one expected at the beginning of the project, and it’s important to be prepared for that. This is especially true for adoptees who have non-identifying information from their adoption agencies. That information can range from 100% accurate to complete fiction. Sometimes the information is so detailed that it seems like it couldn’t possibly be wrong…but it’s wrong. Our job is to gather every single clue, and then let the evidence tell us what’s true. If you’re prepared to do that as well, the emotional side of this journey will be much easier.
Identifying your biological parents is a huge step. We’re glad to be with you on this trip, and we want to work together to get there as quickly as possible. You can help by giving us the information we need to laser focus on finding your birth father or mother (and maybe even a sibling or two).
The experts at Legacy Tree Genealogists are experienced at helping reunite families, present and past. We can help you make sense of your DNA matches and identify your unknown family members. Contact us today for a free estimate.
I took this DZnA test hoping to find family from father I never knew or met? I know his name as Eric Hansen from Pasadena Calif. my mother was Jessie P. Perez from Pasadena Calif. I just wanted to find family and a little diappointec nothing on my fathers side but cousin from 5 generation. My father worked at Dy Dee Service in around 1945 or so. How do I find family from fathers side?
Hi Mary. We have some great free resources available on our blog to help you get started in your search for family from your paternal side. Check out this article: http://www.legacytree.com/blog/documenting-the-unknown-in-your-dna-results. If you’d like to hire our team to assist with the research, you can get started by requesting a free quote here: https://legacytree.com/contact-us.
I don’t think that you need to ask the mother to do a DNA test in unknown father cases. With the new tools on AncestryDNA it’s pretty easy to figure out quickly which side is the paternal side if you know anything at all about the mother’s family because usually lots of her fairly close relatives will show up, and with the new PRO feature you can see how they are all related if you do a family tree for them. Also, many people don’t want to involve their mothers at all. I’m a volunteer “search angel” and have been doing this work for years.
That’s so great that you volunteer! Thanks for sharing!
Forgot to say that when you test on AncestryDNA, you can label your matches maternal or paternal. The good news is that when you label one, AncestryDNA will automatically label most of the other matches either paternal or maternal for you! So like I said, you really usually don’t need to test anyone besides yourself. Which is great because lots of people don’t want their family to know they are searching, or they don’t have a parent they can test. So your blog should be updated with this new information to save people worry, time and money.
We will look into this, thanks again!
This is a good article. As an Australian-born adopted person who has firstly found my birth mother (an Australian living in Canada), and most recently found a probable birth father (deceased – born in England but lived in Australia since the 1960s), I can say that most of what is written here is pretty good advice.
In a nutshell, you’ll need at least one DNA Test. I have two – one firstly on MyHeritage and then later another on Ancestry.
It is important also to try to obtain your adoption papers, if the agencies that were involved in the adopting process – often a government department – are legally able to release documents to adoptees who apply for identifying information that is kept on file. A dossier of official adoption documents will usually provide you a name of at least one parent, and it can be an anchor resource for all subsequent research via DNA matches. Getting these papers is not free, but it will be worth it.
Understanding your DNA matches on the chosen platform is important. Concentrate on studying the closer DNA matches. If these persons don’t have any trees of substance linked to their profile, which is often the case if people get a DNA test just for fun to learn about their ethnicity, then you might have to try to build a tree from scratch or from very little information. Pay attention to names, and get full names if you can.
In my case, my adoption dossier contained my birth mother’s full name and an outline of her immediately family’s structure, which turned out to be accurate. From closer DNA matches that showed up on MyHeritage, I found a large tree that included a family whose name and structure matched the relationships that were shown in the dossier. One name on that tree within that family – my grandfather – had records of military service, which were available freely from the National Archives of Australia.
And from there, things just fell into place. On Facebook, I found the page for a recently deceased sister of my mother’s, and my mother and nearly her whole family were connected to that person’s identity. From there I reached out via email and social media, and within a short time, contact was established. My elderly mother admitted to this adoption event, and the rest of the family, surprised though many were, just accepted it. This led to an in person meet-up in Canada last December.
Finding my birth father was more difficult. There was very little in the dossier about the natural father, and what descriptions there were, were probably just guesses. The best DNA cousin matches on my paternal line were on Ancestry, and while there were quite close, these individuals didn’t build any family trees under their accounts. Furthermore, they were proving difficult to contact via Ancestry’s message service.
So, I was casting a wide net to try identify people on my paternal match line. Colored group matching and the Leeds method helped to focus my search, as did a collaboration with one more distant Australian paternal cousin, who had a fairly large and quite accurate tree to use a reference. In the end, the breakthrough in my search for my bio father came when I found some names on a MyHeritage tree that also linked to my 2nd closest DNA match on Ancestry. It helps to be able to use two DNA matching platforms.
From that, I found names on Facebook and Linked-in, elsewhere on the web, and promptly emailed a discretely-worded letter to a person who could have been a half 2nd cousin. In no time at all, there was a reply, and name of my possible father was proposed. The identity fitted into one of the trees that I had built around this one close DNA match, and that pretty much ended my search. The person proposed as my father was deceased, but they fitted into the tree where they would be, according to the relationship suggested by Ancestry with my DNA match. Further searches for that name turned up other documents, and it could be ascertained that this man and my mother would have resided in the same rural farming area of outback New South Wales at the time of my conception. It was just a fleeting casual encounter, but here I am.
This type of DNA-based investigation has been available for about the last 10 years. My birth father only died three years ago. It is a pity that I didn’t take the initiative sooner to engage in my family search. I didn’t do so mostly because my adopting parent was still living, and time spent on family was largely spent on him, since he was in his 90s. And that is fine. Ultimately I have now found and made positive contact with both strands of my biological ancestry, and I have met my birth mother, and a half sister. The relationship story continues to unfold.
And for me, I am now thinking that perhaps I should become a genealogist, and help other adopted do what I have done. I have an M.A. in Mass Communications, so this kind of online based document study is right up my alley.
Thank you so much for sharing your remarkable journey. Your story beautifully illustrates both the challenges and breakthroughs that can come with adoption research and DNA analysis. The way you combined DNA testing across platforms, official adoption records, and creative use of tools like the Leeds method is inspiring—and shows just how powerful persistence and curiosity can be.
It’s wonderful to hear that you’ve been able to make meaningful connections with both your birth mother and paternal family, even after decades of searching. We know how deeply personal and emotional this type of work can be, and we admire the care you took at each step of the process.
Your idea of becoming a genealogist to help others on similar paths is truly inspiring—you clearly have both the passion and the skillset to make a difference. Thank you again for taking the time to share your experience here. Stories like yours remind us why family history matters so much.