I did a thing last week. I was extremely frustrated about a search for a birth father I couldn’t quite get to the end of. I had been working on it for six months and I was stuck due to the lack of one stinking marriage record!

The DNA told me the birth father had to be the great grandchild of a couple I had identified. They had three children—two sons and a daughter.  I had found a marriage for one of those children, but not the other two. I was pretty sure the couple I had identified were not the grandparents because the spouse’s DNA wasn’t showing up among the adoptee’s DNA matches.

I had to find a marriage record for the other two children. I had looked and looked already. I created profiles for the family unit over at WikiTree and had some colleagues help me look too. But nothing!

I thought the daughter, Harriet Pitts, might be the grandmother based on shared x-DNA of one of the DNA matches on this line.

I decided to sit down one day last week and go through every marriage record I could find for anyone with the name Harriet Pitts, no matter the state it took place in. Previously, I had been staying close to her birth state.

I started at Ancestry and literally followed the genealogy for each marriage record to see if it was my lady. Once again, nada. I then moved over to Family Search. They have one of the largest depositories of marriage records. I started the process over again.

Success, maybe?

Suddenly I came across a record in Indiana in the county where the daughter was last living. I placed this record and the spouse in my tree over at Ancestry and followed the genealogy trail. It took me awhile to get confirmation this was the correct spouse.

A few different things gave me that confirmation. One, I found her obituary. It stated she grew up Catholic. This wasn’t common for the area she lived in with her spouse and his family wasn’t Catholic. Check. Next I found her death certificate which named her father as A Pitts. Check.

But the clincher came when I identified all her children (two sons and two daughters) and their spouses. I discovered her oldest son married a Carleton. Why is this significant? It’s a name that matched someone in the other paternal DNA group. I hadn’t yet been able to narrow down this group from the common ancestral couple due to the DNA matches being farther than I’d like.

I first checked to see who the Carleton spouse’s parents were and then headed over to the mini tree I had built for the other DNA group. Sure enough the spouse and her parents were already in that tree. Connection made!

Now I knew a son of this couple would be the birth father. And thankfully, they only had one son. Not only that, he was at the right place at the right time. Hooray!

When the Going Gets Tough…

You might wonder why I have written about this event.

Not only was this discovery an exhilarating moment in my life (there was some definite happy screaming involved), it brought up two important points I wanted to share.

When the going gets tough, find another way in. When I couldn’t find the marriage record I needed, I worked on the other paternal DNA group as hard as I could to see if I could find the spouse that way. It often works for me. Unfortunately, it didn’t work this time since I needed to come down several generations from the common couple in the tree, but it might have eventually if I kept going.

Don’t ever give up! Stick with it. The answer is there somewhere, but sometimes that one piece of information you need in order to bring it all together is hiding and you have to dig a little deeper to get to it. Sometimes it means looking at every single record you can find for that person’s name. But tenacity pays off every time!