These days, it’s hard to find accommodation supplied with resident music legends.
John Archer from Hunters and Collectors was my boss in the IT support department for a while, does that count?
Only if he lived in your house too.
A step brother married at 55. His silver anniversary is next week.
l got married 5 years ago, at 64.
Married for the first time, for both of us.
My brother has no kids, my wife wants one.
Just over 30 years ago l got a phone call from my dear old mum. She wanted me to take her out for dinner one Sunday night, as she had something she wanted to tell me. So off we went. After dinner she confided in me that l had an older half sister, who had been adopted at birth. She had told no one else, except an older sister, who was now deceased. She had kept the secret for nearly 40 years, and l know that it cost her mental health a great deal to remain silent. A similar fate could have befallen me, but she was determined to hang on to me.
I asked her why she had told me this news, and she said it was in case l wanted to find her. She had nothing to go on, but the confession had been triggered by a recent story on the front page of the Sun, in which the wife of the Tasmanian premier admitted that she was adopted. Mum also thought her daughter had been brought up on Tasmania. Apart from that l had nothing to go on. I scratched around a little, without much success. Then a couple of months later, mum rang to tell me, her daughter had found her, contact had been made. I was given a phone number and rang that night. What does one say to a sibling they have never met? How to introduce yourself? I didn’t give it too much thought at the time. I just rang and said, ‘l think l am your brother.’
We talked for over half an hour, during which time she explained that she had been looking for mum for well over 20 years. At one stage she lived in Sandringham, only about 4km away. She lived in the same street where l had mates renting at the time, so there was a slight chance we had crossed paths in the street many years ago, without ever knowing or suspecting that we were related. A family meeting was arranged. Before we could meet, the news had to be broken to my step–father. Mum wanted me and my younger sister there for support when she told him, as she didn’t know how he would take the news. In the end, he was fine.
We met my sister and her husband. It was too late for us to develop a close bond, but we have caught up a few times since then. While she was looking for us, my sister had delved into our family history and found that we were related to the merchants who set up in Gundagai with the dog on the tuckerbox. Looking deeper, she found that an early ancestor was Katie Conroy from County Cork. I would love to get to the Emerald Isle and find out more, but l doubt that will ever happen.
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Jim Keays boarded at my Nans house for a couple of years when he was starting out on the scene.
My Grandfather on Dads side died several years before I was born and Dad had moved out by then so Nan had a decent sized house in Burnside and would take in boarders
My parents used to take me to Melbourne zoo every Sunday. They were hoping my real parents would claim me.
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As previously advised, my mum’s dad’s parents were toddler boat people:
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Interesting post Frosty. My mother had my siblings and my uncles do these tests a few years ago, and I found the categories a bit odd. E.g., I had quite a high Middle Eastern percentage, but there are heaps of ethnicities there, surely you can’t just throw a blanket over the whole region? Is it purely from lack of information? Anyway, looks like people used to ask me if I was Lebanese for a reason…
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I can’t see what could possibly go wrong with sending your DNA to the internet.
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This is how the Claremont and Golden State serial killers were caught. Those individuals weren’t on the data base but their relatives were. In the case of the Claremont suspect, the police in WA narrowed the potential culprits down and surreptitiously collected DNA from them. In the case of the convicted individual, they followed him to the movies and collected his DNA from a discarded drink cup. Without this technology, both of these fellows wouldn’t have been convicted.
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I looked up my ancestors and found them to be a bunch of Neanderthals!
Nothing wrong with a little bit of cross species mating!
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