'We never knew he existed' - power of family history comes to light in the Illawarra

With one commercial DNA test done on a whim, a giant question mark had landed in Jean’s* lap. Results from her daughter’s Ancestry test revealed a secret that Jean’s late husband had taken to the grave.

“My daughter’s result returned a match with a man – they had the same father,” Jean says.

Her husband had passed away some years ago without mention of the child he had fathered. The Illawarra woman thought if there was an answer to be found, it was profoundly buried.

So she began to dig.

Jean spent hundreds of hours scouring death notices on The Ryerson Index, records from the Department of Immigration, State Library of NSW, Trove, Office of Fair Trading, electoral rolls, newspapers and microfilms around Australia until a breakthrough came from a memorial park in Queensland.

It revealed that Jean’s late husband had sired a son who had never known his biological parents.

“His mother lived in Berkeley and was sent off to be a children’s nanny while she awaited the birth of her son,” Jean says.

“It was a very sad time for her … That was the way it was with women who had children out of wedlock – they were treated something terrible.”

Though the discovery had come as a shock to Jean and her daughter, this was balanced with a great measure of excitement to discover there was another member of the immediate family.

That excitement turned into joy when they reached out to this unwitting family member.

“We never knew he existed. But his mother had always spoken to her later children of him … We brought them the news they had all waited for, and a way to contact the long-lost brother they always knew they had,” Jean says.

A reunion was organised at West’s Illawarra with “much excitement” but also, some level of awe for the incredible investigation that had brought them together.

Jean, now throwing herself into the next project of creating a picture book to share with the family, says integral to her research was the Illawarra Family History Group (IFHG) – a collective of family history researchers with a knack for sleuthing.

“You go into the library of a Wednesday or a Friday and there’s always someone there to guide you through it,” she says.

“They always had better contacts, better leads, better ways of finding the things I needed to find. I’d never done anything like this before, so it was invaluable.”

To celebrate National Family History Month (August), IFHG is hosting a Family History and Heritage Fair this Saturday (17 August) in Wollongong to showcase the diversity of heritage in the Illawarra area.

There will be participants representing family history, local history, heritage crafts, heritage transport, local museums, Wollongong City Library, State Archives, U3A and the University of Wollongong, as well as a raffle and books and other items for sale.

Visitors can expect interesting presentations from authors Brenda Inglis-Powell (Soldiers in Different Armies), Wendy and Terry Nunan (West Dapto Catholic cemetery: the early families), John Boyd on his first fleet ancestry and Ancestry.com’s Jason Reeve.

IFHG representatives will also be there, ready to help anyone looking to unearth the stories of their own family histories.

Family History and Heritage Fair takes place on Saturday 17 August, at the City Diggers Club in Wollongong from 10 am to 4 pm. Admission is free and the fair is open to the public.

*Pseudonym used for privacy.