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Hello,
My mother was a war baby born 1944 and given away to a family to take care of. Time passed and she was eventually adopted by that family. Mum knew she was adopted and when her adopted mother passed away her father gave Mum various bits of information on her real family and so the search began . Thankfully her real family have an usual surname so it wasn't too difficult to carry out searches. We hit many brick walls along the way but with the advent of internet, it became much easier to overcome these obstacles. I was able to get copies of documents to start putting the jigsaw together and after a recent, huge breakthrough in February this year, I discovered members of Mum's real family. Unfortunately through my research I found that her real mother had died in the 1970s and indeed her father more recently but, she had two living sisters.
Sadly though, all this , for Mum, was in vain as Mum herself had passed in 1999 but, I had always vowed to find her family and obtain closure for her.
I tentatively reached out to one of the sister' daughters via Facebook and cutting a long story short, about a month later I was then in contact with my newly found cousins and aunts.
Mum was not a surprise to them - family skeletons and all that - they knew they had had a step-sister and went on to tell me the reasons why Mum was given away. We exchanged stories and photographs and finally, for me, I was able to see a photo of my grandmother - it was an extremely emotional, especially seeing the facial similarities.
Sadly, however, though maybe I was expecting too much, the conversation with my aunt dried up and despite her promises to send further information and photographs, these never materialised. It seems the novelty wore off and with a busy family life herself, no time to offer me.
So in a way it was a success but I'm now back to searching alone when I was kind of hoping my new family would be able to fill in various gaps in our family history. Ah well.. back to the genealogy websites!
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