So its been quite some time again since my last post..in fact 10 months! At this point I'm still yet to know for certain who my birthfather is... but I feel its getting closer.
One thing with taking on this challenge is that you become quite determined to leave no stone unturned and I do so many investigative google searches and facebook searches and birth death marriage searches... so many notes and names and dates scribbled... sometimes I think I know more info on peoples history and family tree then they themselves do.
It can seem a little invasive..especially when I reach out to them saying 'I believe I'm related to you / your cousin / your aunty / your grandparent etc'... but yet cant explain exactly how. I'm lucky though because majority of people that I have approached have been good about it.. giving me names or locations of people that become another link in the chain...connecting me a little closer.
Before I get more into where I'm up to today, a follow up from what I mentioned in my last post 10 months ago. The daughter of the second R Paton was going to do a dna test.. I haven't heard any more on this so can just assume she's decided not to or has forgot. Also I messaged the other Robert that a friend knew but again it was never answered. I've not dwelt on this though because I'm now more focussed on researching the info that I get from my dna results on ancestry.com rather then the word of a woman (my birthmother) thats been proven to lie/deny on many things.
So when I first got my dna results there was 44 x 4th cousin or closer matches.
As of today I have 144!!
As explained in my previous post many matches I can conect to my bm side of the family..the ones I can't connect I can only assume belong on my birthfathers side although not always the case. And even knowing or assuming them matches to be paternal it's still very tricky to work out just where we might connect. It often means going back 3..4.. even 5 generations, then going across to their siblings and back down the generations... the possibilities seem endless sometimes.
It's like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.. or a tiny speck of chromosome in an olympic sized gene pool!!
So, about May last year a new match popped up on my dna matches... and it was the highest I'd had... according to Ancestry.com a possible 1st or 2nd cousin!
This is a huge step forward. After so many dead ends and brick walls this was a breakthrough.
The graphs below shows in simple terms what the centimorgan and DNA segment numbers can indicate of a relationship and how that relationship is connected to you.
I started to get excited even allowing myself to think that just maybe by sundown this day I'd know who my biological father was. It'll be pretty easy to work that out now having a first or second cousin to work from. How wrong I was. Here I am 8 months later and still not quite cracked it. Lets call this match JC. I messaged JC via ancestry and then found him on facebook and messaged him but my messages go unseen.....this is killing me.
Talk to me!! You are the link to solving my mystery..don't you realise how important this is!!
I'm getting frustrated... desperate times call for desperate measures. So from his facebook page I'm able to determine who his mother is. I message her just asking her to get JC to check and answer my message to him. She asks is there something she can help with? So with shaky fingers I tell her the back story. Her sons dna matches up with mine and I want to find out how...through who??
This is a huge step forward. After so many dead ends and brick walls this was a breakthrough.
The graphs below shows in simple terms what the centimorgan and DNA segment numbers can indicate of a relationship and how that relationship is connected to you.
I started to get excited even allowing myself to think that just maybe by sundown this day I'd know who my biological father was. It'll be pretty easy to work that out now having a first or second cousin to work from. How wrong I was. Here I am 8 months later and still not quite cracked it. Lets call this match JC. I messaged JC via ancestry and then found him on facebook and messaged him but my messages go unseen.....this is killing me.
Talk to me!! You are the link to solving my mystery..don't you realise how important this is!!
I'm getting frustrated... desperate times call for desperate measures. So from his facebook page I'm able to determine who his mother is. I message her just asking her to get JC to check and answer my message to him. She asks is there something she can help with? So with shaky fingers I tell her the back story. Her sons dna matches up with mine and I want to find out how...through who??
Without publishing too much of their family's private personal lives on here.. I'll just say that I, with the most awesome search angel... researcher and friend, M have pretty much narrowed it down to JCs fathers side... and we are quite sure then to JCs fathers mothers side! We are close. We have a possible candidate but I'm holding myself back from getting too excited. I've been here before to only have it all crumble beneath me. But its hard not to get excited as well. Its all adding up... JC's Great Grandparent is the same person as my potential grandparent.
We have his name.. he's elderly and possibly not in the best health. Hes deaf and so verbal communication is difficult. He's in a nursing home 'in Sydney'.. have a possible suburb. He has a son that would know nothing of me. He has an ex-wife that he is still friends with but would know nothing of me. He may....or may not be my father!! How do I approach him or his family without the risk of totally disrupting their lives. This feels so much more scary and gut churning then it did the first time. Maybe because intuitively I feel this could be the one!! I've talked with a potential first cousin who agrees I could be on the right track!! I just need to keep chipping away at the info I've been given and see if I can strike gold!!
Lets hope its not too long till I update with some good news!!!
