Success Stories

My dad was adopted as a baby in 1941, and for all of his life, we knew nothing about his birth family. That mystery is what pulled me into the world of genealogy.
When I first started searching, UK laws made it nearly impossible to find information. But I didn’t give up. Years of research and a bit of obsession eventually led me to DNA testing and some distant matches. I knew the city where he was born, so I dug into every baby born there that quarter. Made more difficult due to all the mother/baby homes in the area.
I filtered out female births, focusing on babies with the same surname as their mother (assuming they were not married), and built trees for each one, trying to determine who disappeared from the records after their birth registration.
Then came the breakthrough: I cross-referenced surnames from my DNA matches and narrowed it down to one likely surname. I ordered the birth certificate, which was delayed due to a Canada Post strike, but it finally arrived on February 12, 2025. Which incidentally was my Dad's birth mother's 100th birthday.
It was my dad’s birth certificate. And with just a bit more digging… I found his birth family. ??
This journey started with one question - who were my dad’s people? — and turned into a lifelong passion for discovering the stories written in our DNA.