Reunited after 50 years

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November 2004
Re-united with a brother
I never knew I had..
after 50 years !!!

After posting my call into the grave-yard of the Internet for so many years, a most unlikely miracle has happened.

I discover I have a brother!!!

Long after my parents were separated, my mother, foot-lose and fancy-free, had another son in 1958. He was named Robert. He was adopted into the family of Smeallie. He never knew he was adopted right up until his caring mother passed away, and went on a search for his birth parents.

He found his birth mother was Gwendolyn Josephine Dunstan, also my mother, and found her father's name was Cyril Montgomery Dunstan.

November 2024

"The Bridge that pointed the way."

He had spent a great deal of time searching through many genealogy sites for information and leads.

An email to a person - Kevin Maywald - with a very creative website on www.tribalpages.com revealed a connection with the Dunstans. Kevin is husband to one of my second cousins, and is a computer buff with a love for Family. Robert was inspired by Kevin to dig around in the Genealogy websites. After having nothing turn up, by chance he decided to do a Google search-engine search with the name 'Cyril Montgomery Dunstan'... My website page entitled "Missing Persons" appeared in front of him, and for the first time discovered he had a half brother. Me.

[So I guess having such an unlikely page posted to the internet which received "no attention" for years, suddenly made itself the most valuable page on any of my websites...]

Robert has also managed to find my sister, Wendy, who was born about a year or two later than me, and found she has three grown up children and a loving husband who passed away a couple of years ago from cancer.

Suddenly Robert has a brother and a sister for the first time in his life, and it was very difficult for Wendy to accept the hard-to-believe story about a half brother, because for all these years Wendy thought her only brother David (me) had died of pneumonia in early childhood.

For years so many impostors attempting to take advantage of her, had made her very protective of being conned again. So Robert had quite a time convincing her he was a genuine son of Wendy's birth mother, and her half brother.

So Wendy has been comforted and satisfied that she at least had a half brother, but as I type these words off-line, Wendy still knows nothing of my existence as yet.

An irony is that I have also found that the only photograph of my mother I took in 1996 outside a friend's apartment block in Kings Cross, turns out to be the only photograph of her as an adult in existence.

So it seems my search for my Father, Mother, Sister and any relatives for many years, is about to blossom in a way I always believed could never be.

My father is also alive and well in South Australia at the wondrous age of over 80 years. I am looking forward to meeting him for the first time since I was around 6 or 7 years of age. I have to thank him for the candy Easter egg and Chocolate bunny he left during the night while I was awakened in my dormitory bed at the Walkerville orphanage to hear his voice saying something like "he would not be coming back".

PS: Suddenly I remember that it was not a chocolate egg, but a pastel coloured green and pink sweet candy egg.

I believe I had become very ill after that visit and nearly died of pneumonia... I had always thought I had been injured after having fallen off the roof of an old car from which us kids used to swing on a rope tied to a larger willow tree in the garden. I had awoken in bed to be given eucalyptus drops in a bowl of hot water and a towel over my head bending over to breath the fumes... It worked very well. Perhaps I still have a couple of incidents confused... So I'll let that sort itself out in time....

And I was told by my mother that my father did in fact remarry and had two sons. So I also might have two other half brothers who don't know I exist.

But what an amazing experience this has been so far. I am planning to travel to South Australia to meet my father for the first time in over 50 years. As soon as further unfoldings unfold .... I'll let you know of developments as they develop.

You can email me at -

(email address now updated to 2023)
Thank you for reading about and experiencing my personal win.... I do hope this story brings some hope to you if you have been experiencing similar circumstances.....

May my music assist you to cope as it has for me.....

David.

PS: And if you have tried to call me on the phone and was told I am not here.... please try again. You may have been mistaken for a stranger, an alien, or you were talking to a stranger or an alien who thought I was not here or was not here anyway.

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