We recently helped a young Australian woman to locate her grandmother, she had never met. Sarah Hutson had been trying to find her grandmother since 1982, with no luck. She contacted us and ordered our Find Lost Relatives Service, in a matter of weeks we found her grandmother and Sarah was planning to visit the UK for her 100th Birthday! Here is the full story as it appeared in the Hull Daily Mail.
Hull Daily Mail – 20/06/2012. Story by Kate Forrester
A HULL grandmother forced to abandon her children more than 60 years ago has been reunited with her estranged family just in time for her 100th birthday.
Bernice Ogilvie lost touch with her three children after she left Australia to start a new life in England. Despite trying several times to make contact with them, she never received replies to her letters and had given up hope of finding them.
Now, she is looking forward to seeing them again as she celebrates her 100th birthday this month.
Bernice may never have been traced if her Australian granddaughter had not decided to research her family tree.
Sarah Hutson, who lives in Brisbane with her family, started looking in 1982 but kept reaching dead ends.
Eventually, she employed the services of Yorkshire people- finding specialists Finder- Monkey, who managed to track her down to a care home in Hull.
Sarah said: “She had moved to the UK and had remarried which meant her name had changed again making tracing her very difficult.
“A records search in 2007 confirmed she was alive because she was registered with the NHS but the trail went cold because she was no longer at the address on her letter.
“I put adverts in missing persons columns in newspapers, on the internet and in magazines and took advice from numerous psychics to try to find her, but no luck.”
A search for a death certificate last year came back negative, leading Sarah to believe that, at 99 years of age, Bernice might still be alive.
Genealogist David Oates, of Relative Connections, carried out painstaking research tracking Bernice’s life over several decades, which uncovered further marriages and multiple house moves.
He said: “Initial searches for Bernice came back with no match but we persisted and eventually found out she had been married in Gloucester in 1977.
“With a new surname to help us, we traced her to an address in Settle in 1992 and then searched through more marriage records which eventually led us to a village in East Yorkshire, where we discovered she had lived for a few years before moving into a care home.
“We did a couple of final checks to make sure we were certain we had the right person before contacting Sarah.”
Sarah was starting to give up hope of finding her grandmother when she finally heard the news she had been waiting for.
She said: “I finally got to meet my grandmother in April to let her know her family had never forgotten her and her newly discovered Australian family will be with her when she celebrates her 100th birthday this month.”