Case Study 4

This is the one that started it all.

I already knew I was NPE before I ever took a DNA test — my biological father wasn't the man who'd brought me up. What I didn't know was where I actually came from. Curiosity got the better of me, and I tested to find out.

A close maternal relative also tested, which helped me distinguish more confidently between matches belonging to different sides of my family. But finding my biological paternal line meant starting from nothing.

I taught myself everything I could — the Leeds Method, relationship-probability tools like WATO, ways of grouping and comparing matches, and which databases were worth uploading my results to. My strongest useful paternal match at the time shared around 229 cM with me and had helpful family information, but that match alone wasn't enough to identify my biological father.

So I worked backwards: researching my strongest paternal matches' family trees to find where their ancestry converged. Once I'd found the likely common family, I changed direction and started building forward again through their descendants — which let me identify men who could plausibly have been my biological father, based on family connection, generation, age, and location. Then I could test those candidates against the DNA evidence.

There was no single dramatic match that cracked it. As more matches came in over time — some through other DNA databases — they kept pointing towards one particular family. Eventually, DNA from a descendant of my suspected biological father's close family confirmed the connection.

This is why I came into genealogy from an unusual angle — I didn't start as a family historian who later picked up DNA. I started with DNA, because curiosity about my own story needed answering. That meant learning, from scratch, how to group matches, rebuild families, identify common ancestors, build descendant trees forward, test competing theories, and weave it all together with the documentary record. It's also what led me to start helping other people with their own family mysteries, and to pursue formal training to strengthen the documentary side of my work.

What this case shows: sometimes the most personal question is the hardest one to answer — and the one that teaches you the most.