40
In 1988 when I was 8 years old and my Dad was 40, he applied for life insurance for his electrician company and his life was turned upside down.
By Hannah White
In 1988 when I was 8 years old and my Dad was 40, he applied for life insurance for his electrician company and his life was turned upside down.The application process required my Dad to get a copy of his birth certificate, which he had to request from the government. It was then that he learned that he was adopted and that the people he thought were his parents were in fact his uncle and aunty, and that his biological mother was his uncle’s younger sister, known as Jennie.
Jennie lived in the same house as the family in Litherland, Liverpool when my Dad was growing up. She carried out domestic duties and was known as his “mad aunt.” Unfortunately, his adopted parents and his biological mother had passed away at the time that my dad had learned about his adoption, and all other living family members confessed that they had known of the family secret for 40 years.
Understandably, my dad was completely shocked and felt like his childhood had been a lie. He wanted to know why the secret was kept for so long and also who his biological father was, as that part of his birth certificate was left blank.
He wrote to anyone and everyone who knew the family when he was growing up, asking his older “brother,” (the biological child of his adopted parents) and his mother’s younger sister, who his father was. But nobody had any information to share with him. So he had to accept that he would never know and carry on with his life.
Three years ago in the summer of 2023, I (my dad’s youngest daughter) watched the BBC documentary DNA Family Secrets, which uncovered cases about unknown paternal heritage similar to my Dad’s and used DNA to try to solve them.
Determined to solve my Dad’s family secret, I bought him a DNA test from Ancestry for his Christmas present. When the results came back, to our amazement we learned that his paternal heritage was part West African and that his father’s family were most likely from the Caribbean island of Trinidad. That’s when my obsession to find his father kicked off. I booked a consultation with the professional genealogist team at Ancestry for advice, and they recommended joining a Facebook group called DNA Detectives. I posted my story on their page and a lovely lady contacted me offering to be my “search angel” and help me find my dad’s biological father.
Using her skills, she spent hundreds of hours building out my dad’s paternal family tree and contacting DNA matches to obtain any information about the family that might help with our search.
Then, after sending multiple DNA tests to the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States, and after hundreds of hours spent scrolling through endless newspaper articles, genealogy records, and family trees, we finally found him in a record, then living on the same street as my dad’s biological mother, who was living with her parents at the time.
Henry Fitzroy Ellis was a seaman working as a steward on the Cunard Line between Liverpool, New York, and Boston in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. He was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad in 1886.
At 62 years old, he was a widow when he and my 40-year-old grandmother Jennie had a relationship that resulted in the birth of my dad. Sadly, for some reason we’ll never know, once Jennie became pregnant, she was whisked off to live with her brother—a one hour drive away, My dad was adopted and bought up as her brother’s child, and a year later Henry returned to Trinidad, where he passed away in the late 1950s. Unfortunately we have no more records for him from that time on.
Hannah White is a self-employed fitness coach who lives in greater Manchester, England, with her husband and 10-year old son.