update unknown brothers & sisters

[paddywak]

First of all,thanks to everybody who replied to my first post. Anyway the news is that after contacting her mothers only surviving brother my friend was able to find out just about everything she needed to know. Apparrently he had always remained friendly and in contact with his ex-brother in law but had never dared admit to it because he didn't want to upset the family. She now knows where they live and telephone numbers etc but she can't make her mind up what to do next, as she says you can't just turn up on a total strangers door step and say hello "I'm your sister"

[craft1948]

Glad to hear she has some resolution paddy......now as you say the rest is up to her.

[dothawkes31]

We have just recenrtly tracked down my kids' Nan's missing uncle, well his children, the uncle was taken away by the catholic Nuns in 1911 after his parents both died within months of one another, and the 3 older children were out at work and one day came home and the little bot and his baby sister had been taken. Anyway, those two children were put into Southall Orphanage and the girl became a Nun and the boy was put into the army as a boy soldier. He worked at the Woolwich Arsenal and then was transferred to the starfordshire Arsenal in 1938 and married locally, he had 2 children and we have now contacted his surviving son who had no idea of any of us , the Uncle died when his son was 15 and so this cousin has not had the chance to ask anything of his dad. So now we have made contact purely by confirning the civil registration records were correct and writing to the address on the Uncles daughter's death cert, which was of her brother, the surviving cousin.
So we wrote to him last week, explaining who we were, how we had found him, explaining how the family was connected and we gave him the option of telephone, letter or email, and on sunday night he emailed us, he was absolutely over the moon! He had no idea he had such a huge missing family!!!
To be honest until the 1911 census came our neither did we, as the generation his father belonged to did not talk about what happened to the 2 children, nor did they have the ability to track those children down,

My advice to your friend would be to do a personal letter, explaining who she is and that she has always wondered who her siblings might be.

Good luck to her I say, nothing ventured nothing gained.

[dothawkes31]

*boy not bot!
*staffordshire!!!

[paddywak]

I'm fairly sure that Sue likes the idea of having a "new" family and that she will eventually contact them, it's just taking a bit of getting used to,she was also saying that with her father being married four times there's no telling just how many relations she's got out there that she knows absolutely nothing about.

[dundurn]

I have a similar story to Dot's. A family of 5 taken into care in about 1912; the oldest 11, the youngest 3. Over the years the kids were "released" into society with no real thought to keeping them together as a family. My gran was the eldest and had my Dad and his brother in her early 20s - no father known - she was dead before she reached 40. Her next oldest brother was sent off to Canada aged around 14 without any notification to their mother. The youngest girl was pretty institutionalised by the time she came out but eventually married and had kids.

In the last few years by tracking down birth records and lots of luck with websites we've tracked down both the Canadian family and the three children of the youngest daughter. Everybody has treated the renewed contact as something nearly miraculous and we're all in regular touch with each other. Take it gently and don't rush things - most people are only too glad to find out they have others in the world who share something of their past.