Every case I take on is unique, but the goal is always the same — to give someone the answers they deserve. The following case studies are real, with some names and identifying details changed to protect the privacy of everyone involved. Each is shared with the full knowledge and permission of the client. 

How it began

Kevin's journey into DNA research started not with questions about himself, but with a desire to help someone else. A potential half-sister had reached out hoping to identify her biological father, and Kevin agreed to test. He wasn't expecting the results to tell him anything he didn't already know.

They did. The man who had raised Kevin was not his biological father. This discovery — known in the genealogy community as an NPE, or Not Parent Expected result — affects far more families than most people realise. For Kevin, it arrived without warning, without context, and without anyone to turn to. He found DNA Detectives in a state of shock. We began, as I always do in these situations, by slowing things down.

Making sense of the results

Before any research could begin, Kevin needed to understand what his DNA results actually meant — what the matches were telling us, what was certain, what was probable, and what remained unknown. This stage is never rushed. Being handed life-altering information without proper context can do more harm than good.

Once Kevin felt ready, and with his full agreement, I began working through his paternal DNA matches using the Leeds Method — a systematic approach to grouping matches into family clusters — alongside careful tree-building across more than 20 matches.

The first complication

As the paternal picture began to emerge, a significant obstacle appeared. Kevin's biological father was himself the result of an NPE — meaning his father's identity wasn't recorded in any paper trail either. The conventional routes were closed. We had to find another way.

A different approach

With the paper trail exhausted, I identified a small number of key family members who could help unlock the search through targeted DNA testing. This is a delicate step — it involves approaching people who may have no idea they hold a piece of someone else's puzzle, and doing so sensitively and respectfully.

Kevin handled these conversations with remarkable courage. The family members he approached were not only willing to test — they were genuinely supportive of his search. Their results provided the breakthrough we needed, identifying both Kevin's biological father and his paternal grandfather.

The second complication

Just as the paternal search was progressing, a second layer of complexity emerged. Kevin's mother had her own unknown father — a gap in her history that had never been addressed. Solving Kevin's search fully would ultimately require solving hers too. What had begun as one mystery had quietly become three.

A year in the making

Complex cases rarely move in straight lines. Over the course of twelve months we followed the evidence carefully — building trees, testing hypotheses, pursuing leads, and sometimes starting again. Each breakthrough brought the next question into focus.

Throughout the process Kevin remained patient, trusting, and extraordinarily determined. Cases like this one are solved by the client as much as the researcher.

The outcome

At the end of twelve months, three unknowns had been identified. Kevin knew who his biological father was. He knew who his paternal grandfather was — his father's own unknown father. And he had uncovered the identity of his maternal grandfather, the father his mother had never known.

Kevin chose to share the news about his maternal grandfather with his mother first — giving her something precious before raising the more sensitive subject of his own paternity. It was a thoughtful, generous decision. Armed with that gift, he was able to open a conversation with her that she had perhaps never felt able to have. She told him everything.

Three unknowns solved. A family full of gaps finally filled in — not just for Kevin, but for his mother too.

A lifetime of wondering

Gloria came to me in her eighties. She had asked family members over the years and been given a single name — Stuart Law. Beyond that, almost nothing. No DNA test had ever been taken, no records searched. Just a name, a few fragmented stories, and a lifetime of unanswered questions.

When we spoke for the first time, Gloria was clear about what she wanted. Not contact, not confrontation — simply to know where she came from. That quiet clarity shaped everything that followed.

The challenge of thin evidence

Gloria had never tested her DNA, so we began there. When her results came back, the picture was immediately daunting. Her closest matches sat at the 3rd to 4th cousin level — distant relatives with sparse trees and limited paper trails. For most searches this would be manageable. For Gloria, born in the 1930s, it meant researching family lines that stretched back into the years before general registration — some of the most difficult genealogical territory there is.

The first obstacle

Using Gloria's DNA matches I identified two distinct clusters of relatives on the paternal side and began building family trees outward from each. The work was painstaking — thin matches, pre-registration records, and gaps at every turn. But there was a more fundamental problem emerging. None of the matches led anywhere near a family called Law.

The name Gloria had been given — Stuart Law — appeared to be a dead end. Either the information was wrong, or something else entirely was going on.

Three years of patient research

What followed was three years of careful, methodical work. Piecing together tiny fragments of evidence. Building trees branch by branch. Following leads that sometimes went nowhere. Searching records across multiple countries. This is the kind of search that requires patience above almost everything else — the willingness to keep going when the answer refuses to come.

The break, when it finally came, arrived through a 78cM DNA match — a relatively close connection for Gloria, though distant in normal DNA terms. The information received from this match allowed me to focus on one area of the tree and lead to a single family connecting to both clusters. That family had two sons.

The breakthrough

One of the brothers had no living descendants. The other did — and through careful research I was able to trace a granddaughter and ask whether she would be willing to take a DNA test. She agreed without hesitation. While we waited for her results to come back, I began piecing together the story of the brothers themselves.

A man of many names

What I found in those weeks of waiting was remarkable. Through newspaper archives, specialist records held in Australia, Scotland, and Spain, I began to reconstruct the life of one of the brothers — a man who had changed his name at least four times across his lifetime.

He had fought in the Spanish Civil War. He had sailed the world as a Merchant Seaman, his voyages recorded in ports across multiple continents. He was a man who had lived several lives under several names — each one a chapter in a story that had never been told in full.

And then, in his Seaman's card, I found it. The name Stuart Law.

He hadn't given Gloria's mother a false name. He had given her one of his real ones.

Confirmed

When the granddaughter's DNA results came back, they proved it beyond any doubt. This extraordinary, elusive, endlessly travelling man was Gloria's biological father. The family, once they understood what the search had uncovered, responded with extraordinary kindness — sending a whole collection of photographs so that Gloria could finally see his face.

The outcome

Gloria now knows who her biological father was. She has seen his photographs and learned his story — the Civil War, the ships, the countries, the names. She discovered she had a half-brother, now sadly also passed, and was able to meet with his wife's niece — a woman who, though not biologically related, had grown up alongside him and shared stories of the man he was.

His story, fragmented across decades and continents, had finally been put back together. Gloria could look at her father's face. She knew his history. She knew his family. And after eighty years, she finally knew where she came from.

"I don't feel so disconnected now." - Gloria

A lifetime of silence

Lynda's story began the way so many do — with a secret her mother took to the grave. Born in Dublin in May 1955, Lynda had been due to be adopted as a baby, but her grandfather intervened and brought her home. Her mother married when Lynda was nearly five, and the family settled into a quiet fiction — that her stepfather was her real father. Nobody spoke about it.

Her mother died in January 1968. Lynda was eleven years old, and the one person who could have answered her questions was gone. Before she died, her mother had been hospitalised for three years. There had never been a moment to ask. There had never been a conversation.

The only clue Lynda carried through the decades was a surname she had once overheard — McElwee — mentioned in connection with her biological father. Nothing else. No first name, no date, no location. Just a name, and a lifetime of wondering.

The brick wall

By the time Lynda reached out to me, she had already taken a DNA test on Ancestry and tried everything she could think of. Her closest DNA match — the one person who might have unlocked the search immediately — had disabled their messages and was unreachable. Others had tried to contact them too, without success. A family member had helped build a tree with Charles McElwee listed as a possible father, but there was no proof, and the trail had gone cold.

The challenge

Irish genealogy is among the most difficult in the world. Records are sparse, many were destroyed, and common family names repeat across generations. Lynda had one surname, no first name, a birth year of 1955, and a closest DNA match who was not responding. She had been searching for years and had run out of ideas. She was seventy years old. She had never stopped hoping.

Building the picture

The DNA told a clear story from the start — Lynda was definitely connected to the McElwee family. The question was which McElwee. Her closest matches pointed to Charles McElwee and Mary Hyland as her grandparents, but Charles and Mary had several sons, and narrowing it down to one of them required a completely different approach.

I spent several days adding Lynda's matches to a research tree and then ran a WATO analysis — What Are The Odds, a predictor tool that calculates the most likely relationship based on the DNA shared between a tester and their matches. The result showed that any of the McElwee brothers could be her father, with Charles being the most likely candidate based on age and the available evidence.

The next task was proving it. The key was finding descendants of each brother who might be willing to take a DNA test. This meant following each brother through electoral registers, marriage records, newspaper archives, cemetery records, and eventually Facebook — tracking the family from Dublin across the Irish Sea to Birmingham, where several of the brothers had settled.

The breakthrough

Through a combination of electoral register entries, marriage certificates, and birth records, I identified that Charles McElwee had married a Kathleen O'Connor in Dublin in 1956 and the couple had children including a daughter, Rita, and a son, John. Cross-referencing addresses showed Charles living briefly at the same Birmingham address as his brothers before moving out — consistent with the timeline of Lynda's conception. Everything pointed to Charles as her biological father.

Making contact

Finding the family on Facebook, I was able to identify Rita, John, and their children. The next step was the most delicate of all — making contact with strangers and asking them to consider a DNA test to help a woman they had never heard of find out if their father was also hers.

Lynda handled this with remarkable courage and grace, crafting her approach carefully and waiting patiently through weeks of silence and uncertainty. One of Charles's children — Trisha — agreed to test. The kit was sent. And then came the wait.

It was a long one. Weeks stretched into months. Lynda checked her phone every day, sometimes twice. I checked Lynda's results every few days. The processing was delayed. Christmas passed. January passed. February passed.

"I've waited 71 years," Lynda told me during one of our check-ins, "so maybe a couple more weeks won't be too difficult. Frustrating though."

* * *

On the 6th of March 2026, the result came through.

It confirmed everything. Charles McElwee was Lynda's biological father. Trisha was her half-sister. And Trisha, it turned out, had already reached out to let Lynda know.

The outcome

Lynda's biological father has been confirmed as Charles McElwee, originally from Dublin, who later settled in Birmingham. She has discovered four half-siblings — Rita, John, Trisha, and one further sibling now sadly deceased. Trisha made contact on the day the results came through. Lynda was in Ireland when she heard the news. A meeting was arranged for the following week.

Lynda had been searching for seventy-one years. From the day she first messaged me to the day she found her family was five months. She is now planning to meet her brothers and sisters for the first time.

"Trisha contacted me this morning to let me know. I'm so excited and a touch overwhelmed to be honest. I just can't thank you enough. I couldn't have done it without you. I will be forever grateful."