Questions about biological parentage often involve both living families and incomplete historical records. I use DNA matches, reconstructed family trees, ages, places and documentary sources to narrow the possible relationships while keeping the personal nature of the research in view.
Questions I commonly receive
- An adopted person seeking biological parents
- An unknown father, grandfather or great-grandparent
- A surprise DNA result or unexpected close match
- A historical illegitimacy or informal adoption question
- Conflicting names or parent details in official records
A useful starting point
Send the known family tree, the DNA platform and useful matches, together with any certificates or adoption papers you hold. Approximate ages, places and family stories can also help establish which families need to be investigated first.
Accessing the match information
Research may use AncestryDNA, GEDmatch or another available platform, depending on where the useful matches are found. Access may be provided through a platform’s collaborator tools or through permitted match information, screenshots, tree links and exports. Please do not send account passwords through the enquiry form.
Building and testing candidate families
I group the relevant matches and build their trees until common families begin to emerge. Candidate parents or grandparents are then checked against chronology and geography, followed by civil registration, parish records, electoral registers, newspapers and other sources that can place people in the right family and place.
Why these cases are usually worked in stages
A recent unknown-parent case with close matches may develop differently from a question several generations back. Some projects begin with an assessment of the existing results; others require several family networks to be built before any candidate can be tested. The quote defines the first research stage and an estimated timetable.
Smaller assessment questions may fit the Quick Search, while a full parentage investigation is charged at £35 per hour and will normally begin with a five-hour stage before we review the evidence and next steps.
How I explain the findings
The agreed output may include a report explaining the DNA and documentary evidence, reconstructed descendant trees, a relationship chart, source references, a record of the hypotheses tested and recommendations for further testing or records.
Living relatives and contact decisions
The research may identify living people who have never expected to appear in a genealogy enquiry. I treat their information as private. The report explains the evidence; any decision about contact belongs to the client.
When an identification remains uncertain
Some match sets lead to a named parent or grandparent; others point only to a particular family or sibling group. Distance of matches, missing records and the absence of the right testers can all limit the result. If the answer remains provisional, I explain exactly what additional evidence could strengthen it.
A case where DNA narrowed the family
The Henry Logan case study demonstrates how DNA can establish a connection to a wider family while the exact parentage question remains partly unresolved. It shows why a careful report must distinguish what is proved from what is still a working hypothesis.