Aimee Egan0:00
Hey guys, welcome back. So my next case is one that was from Seattle, Washington. He was adopted and we were able to identify both parents, thankfully, partially because of the non-ID information that we had gotten, but also because of some ethnicity. We used that to our advantage, and I'm going to tell you how. Welcome back to Client Stories with Amy. So like I said, he was adopted in 1947 in Seattle, Washington. That area isn't quite as known for their Italian population as they are for their Norwegian type of population, but there was an influx of Italian immigrants that came in around 1910, 1920 time period. The birth father was actually a first generation born in the United States. Actually, some of his siblings were still born in Italy, but he was one of the first kids to be born in the United States. So back to the non-ID information and using ethnicity to our advantage. On the non-ID information, which isn't always correct, sometimes they get close, sometimes it's completely out of left field, but sometimes it is right. In this case, it was right. We had a complete split of matches. We had completely European type matches, Norwegian and some English and Irish on one side of the DNA matches, and the other side was primarily Italian. So I was able to separate these two pretty easily, following the Dana Leeds method. But then you get to the point where which one's mom, which one's dad? You don't know until you start getting in there. Hopefully one only has girls and one only has boys, and you can say, well, this most recent common ancestor line only has daughters, so this has to be the mom's side or whatever. But in the case where you can use ethnicity to your advantage, we knew based on the non-ID information that mom's side was primarily white and the dad's line was going to be Italian. So when I was able to do the Dana Leeds method and split these into two different groups, I knew this group was my mom's side and this group is going to be my dad's side. I knew that was going to help me out. So I was able to identify the birth father, thankfully because he had a grandchild that tested. So I was able to use that DNA set of Morgan along with the most recent common ancestors to identify that that one DNA match's grandfather was our client's birth father. He was the only one in the family to be educated, but he didn't quite use his degree. He ended up taking over his father's grocery store. They owned a grocery store in the Georgetown neighborhood, something like that. He owned a grocery store in that area in the 1920s, 1930s. So when our client's birth father grew up, went to college, came back home, he ended up taking over that grocery store with his father. Then when his father passed away, he ended up just taking it over completely. He actually passed that on to his son, so this is a third generation grocery store at this point. Our client actually went there when we gave him the information. 'Hey, here's your biological family.' Our client, mind you, was born in 1947. He's not a spring chicken anymore. Him and his daughter went to this grocery store just to kind of look at things before he reached out to the family line. What was kind of fun about this case is that the only reason why our client decided to do a DNA test and identify his birth parents is because of his daughter. His daughter and him had a conversation about, 'Where do you come from? We know what's on that non-ID information. We don't know anything else. What if there's some medical issues that we need to be aware of? What if you have a cool history or you descend from these really prolific people in history? You don't know anything to brag about to pass on. I don't have anything about your side of the family, but I have this long, rich history on mom's side, but nothing for you.' So our client sat there and thought about it. He's like, 'You know what, baby girl, you're right. You're absolutely right.' So we did the DNA test and we were able to identify both his biological mother and his father's line, and be able to give him that information and the cool history that they were descended from the Irish or the Italian immigrants, that they owned a grocery store, and that he was the first one college educated in the family, and to give him those family names. We had a name, Alessandro, that was passed down multiple, multiple times. That was a family name that was super popular in their family line. Literally every generation had one on all the lines. But that is it for today, and I'm going to see you guys later. Don't forget to hit like and share. Bye, everybody.
