Staging a family ‘reunion’
By Eve Collett, Content Director
‘Reunion’ isn’t, in fact, the right word - the family members we filmed in Philadelphia last month had never met. Indeed they didn’t even know each other existed, until we came in hoping to solve a mystery for our client and had him take a DNA test. Nonetheless a reunion was what it felt like, because as it turned out, though this generation had never met - their parents and grandparents had been looking for each other for decades.
Setting up for a reunion
This was not of course the first meeting of estranged family members we had facilitated. There were the second cousins in New York that our English client never knew she had, and the descendants of family members believed to be dead following the Holocaust - who had in fact survived and managed to flee to Argentina. But we had never uncovered a family quite as close as those we filmed with last month.
As I wrote about in a previous blog post last year, our client's father had grown up in an orphanage prior to the first world war. Naturally our client had always believed that his father was all alone in the world. So you can imagine his shock (and ours!) when we discovered that he had been placed in the orphanage alongside four siblings. The trauma of the years spent in the orphanage had caused our client's father to leave his past as far behind as possible. But his siblings, particularly his eldest sister - never stopped looking for their lost brother.
Some of the incredible family photos brought to the filming by various family members
By this time it was well into the 1960s, and so the siblings used the only real avenue available at the time - they hired a private detective. But with little information to go on and without the digitization of records, their search was fruitless.
Fast-forward to 2019 and before she passed away one of the siblings' daughters put her DNA on ancestry.com in a final attempt to find her lost uncle. Four years later, our client hired us, and after we added his DNA to the database we got a first cousin match - and nearly 100 years, and 2 generations of separation came to an end.
Handing over to Cosima for a presentation on the family’s roots…
On the day itself we put on a lunch, did a presentation on our research into the family’s pre-American roots and bought balloons. But really we were just enablers, bringing together cousins who said they felt more like brothers and sisters, and reuniting a family who had been trying to find each other for generations.