NO DNA? NO PROBLEM!

Can you find a birth parent without the help of DNA?  Apparently you can... With a little luck.  I'll explain how some non-identifying adoption information was all that was needed to find a birth parent.  As an added bonus, as I was writing this blog, I got an email from another person looking for their birth mom.  She had been looking, on and off, for about for 15 years.  I was able to find her with a simple newspaper search.  I'll share that story at the end of this post.  Some names and data have been changed for privacy.

A woman named Joslyn was adopted shortly after her birth in 1978.  She asked for help finding her birth parents.  She didn't have her DNA results yet, but she did have non-identifying information from the adoption agency.  Sometimes this information is released, but it never tells you the names of the parents.  It may tell you information about the parent's families and medical history, but no names will be given.  Sometimes you get valuable information, sometimes you don't get much at all.  Here's what we know about the birth mother and her family...

• She was 23 years old when she gave birth in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1978.  Therefore, she was born in 1955.
• The birth mother's father (Joslyn's maternal grandfather) died at age 52.  His birth and death years were not given.
• Joslyn's grandmother was alive in 1978 and was 54 years old.  That means she was born around 1923-1924.
• The birth mother had five siblings.  Two of which were firemen.
• The birth mother's father was French and her mother was Irish.
• All four of the birth mother's grandparents were no longer living and appeared to have died from lung problems such as tuberculosis.
• There was no valuable information that could lead us to the birth father.

So where do we even begin?  Well, we have to make a lot of assumptions.  Finding someone with this small amount of information will require some guessing.  We have the location of the birth, New Orleans, Louisiana.  We have the birth year of the mother.  We could try looking for women from New Orleans born in 1955.  That would be a bad place to start however.  Chances are there were a whole lot of women from that area born in 1955.  Also, someone born in 1955 is likely to still be living.  When doing searches on sites like Ancestry, finding living people is more difficult than finding people who have passed away.  I'm going to assume the birth mother is still alive.  When doing a search with little information, I would begin by looking for something unusual that you're not going to see in many families.  What information do we have that's unusual and might be searchable?

Did you find something unusual?  The father's age when he died is unusual.  You won't find too many families with a father dying that young, but we don't know the year of his birth or death.  So, I began my search with his wife's info.  Using Ancestry's search features, I looked for women from New Orleans born around 1923.  I have to assume she's from New Orleans or that area.  The site lets you select a year range.  I chose +/- 1 year (See image below).  I chose female for the gender, and location, New Orleans, LA.  This brings up a huge amount of information that you can't possibly look through however.  What I want to do is, find someone else on this website who has this family in their tree.  You'll see on the left side of the screen, different options to narrow your search.  I chose FAMILY TREES.  A huge list of trees made by other people on Ancestry will appear.  I'm showing just a couple below.  I'm assuming someone has this family in their tree.  I could be wrong.  Again, there's a lot of guessing when you have no DNA.

As you can see in the image above, Ancestry will show you data from trees based on the info you gave it.  There's thousands of results though.  In these two, SOME of the information matches.  We have women from New Orleans who were born in 1923.  Their spouses birth and death years are shown, and their parents birth and death years are shown.  Remember, we were told that all four of the birth mother's grandparents were dead in 1978.  Here we see the parents of the mother were dead, she was born at the right time and in the right place, and the husbands shown for these two women both died young... HOWEVER, the ages of the husbands aren't quite right.  We have to get ALL the right info.  These guys did not die at age 52.  Surprisingly, I did find a few trees with husbands who died at 52, but other things didn't match up.  The family didn't have six children, or all four parents didn't die before 1978.  After about fifteen pages of trees, I realized there were just too many women born around 1923-1924 in the New Orleans area.  This wasn't going to work.

I had to find a way to narrow things down.  I made another assumption.  It's very typical that the husband in the family is a few years older than the wife.  Not always the case of course.  The husband could be ten or more years older, or maybe younger than the wife.  Age 52 is unusual for an age of death though, so I tried a different approach.  I did a search for a male from New Orleans, born around 1921, plus or minus one year.  You can also enter a death date.  I chose 1973, plus or minus one year.  This will give me a list of all men who died around age 52 who are slightly older than a woman from New Orleans who was born around 1923.  Pretty crazy idea, right?

Think about all the assumptions going on here.  We're assuming these people are from New Orleans.  We're assuming the father is slightly older than the mother.  We're assuming someone on this website is going to have this family in their tree.  We're assuming the trees we find will be complete and accurate,  AND we're assuming the non-identifying paperwork is correct.  I've written an article about how non-id info can be incorrect or even fake, so all of this might go nowhere.  The odds of this working are about a million to one.  We'll need some luck.

After entering my search data, I ended up with a list of trees for men from New Orleans, born in the early 1920s and died around age 52.  There was still lots of tree data to scroll though, but I ended up with a good list of guys who died young.  I quickly scrolled through them looking for wives who were born around 1923-1924.  Each time I found one, I'd then check the age of the parents.  If they both died before 1978, then I went a step further.  I clicked on the tree and checked if the wife's parents also died before 1978.  And finally, I made sure the family had six children listed.  There were several families that had some of that info correct.  After scrolling though just a few pages of tree data, one family caught my attention.

Here we see data for Joseph Cormier, born in 1921, died in 1973.  His wife Lucille was born in 1923 and was alive in 1978.  The death age of his parents really caught my attention.  They were very young.  This indicates to me that there was likely some kind of heath problem.  Remember, the paperwork said they may have died from tuberculosis.  I also noticed the surnames.  I had never heard the name Cormier.  I looked it up and was surprised to see, it's French.  The mother's maiden name Gaultier is also French.  Remember, the paperwork did say he was French.  Next, I clicked on the tree to get more detailed info.  It showed me the death dates of Lucille's parents.  Both died before 1978.  Then the real clincher, they had six children, including a daughter born in 1955.  She had passed away, and I was unable to find an obituary.  I did find an obit for her brother who also passed away.  It mentioned he was a fireman (as mentioned in the paperwork).  This led me to looking into other brothers who were alive.  I found another fireman.  If this is wrong, there would be a whole lot of crazy coincidences.  I was quite confident this was the correct family.  Joslyn finally got her DNA results and it was easy to confirm, this was all correct.  That means every assumption I made was correct.  What are the odds?

I mentioned earlier, I got involved with another search at the same time as this one.  A woman named Sarah, gave me a small amount of info.  She said her birth mother's father was a college pathology professor in Florida and he died in 1968.  Before even finding out if she had done DNA, I decided to see if that small amount of info could lead anywhere.  I did a newspaper search for "Pathologist, Florida, Professor 1968."  Surprisingly, an obituary came up.  It included names of his daughters and his wife's maiden name.  Could it really be this easy?  Later when looking at Sarah's DNA, everything matched up to this guy's family and his wife's family.  It really was correct.  If we didn't have DNA in this case, we'd at least have a place to start and could contact people mentioned in the obituary.  With or without DNA, we still would end up with the same correct result.  So, even if you haven't submitted DNA, don't give up.  You never know what you might find from the smallest amount of information and some creative searching.

REFERENCES
• Ancestry.com  • New Orleans photo, wikimedia.com, public domain image.

My next post involves a story about babies being sold to celebrities.