Jim & June

Long Lost Cousins

The Story

Jim was born in 1953 and remembers fondly his Aunt Elsie & slightly older Cousin June visiting the house when he was a boy. Jim’s mother Elizabeth & his Aunt Elsie were sisters.

Jim was one of 5 sons and his cousin June would act as an older sister to all of the brothers on her visits and help the boys with reading and writing as well as cooking with them.

June’s mother Elsie struggled with her health and June’s father had died when she was very young. In the 1960s June was “courting” a member of the armed forces who travelled the world.

In the 1960’s Elsie finally succumbed to her ill health and passed away. June visited Jim’s house and spoke with his mother with Jim in the room. June advised that with her mother now passed away she would be leaving the area and in all likelyhood would never see the family again. She also advised that with her inheritance she would order and have delivered to Jim’s family a new dining table and chairs.

Jim recalls his mother speculating after the meeting that she felt June was pregnant and also that she thought June would leave the country given she was believed to have been courting a member of the armed forces.

The Investigation

We quickly put together a family tree for June & Jim and it confirmed that June was indeed an only child. A tree was quickly put together for June’s parents and it was noted Junes father had several siblings so tree’s were produced for those people too. Contact was made with some descendants from June’s fathers family but nobody had any information about what became of June with only 1 even knowing that she existed. This was a dead end.

June had a common surname so many marriage records were possibilities but with so many to research it was felt this may be too time consuming to produce full trees for all these possible matches. With Margarets intuition being that June was pregnant at this meeting in 1967 It was decided to focus on combining 1967 marriages for people sharing June’s surname with late 1967 or very early 1968 births to reduce down the number of possibilities. This led to a handful of matches and trees were produced for these people which led to some possible modern day descendants.

Internet searches revealed some possibilities and emails were sent but not responded too so letters were sent to electoral roll addresses.

A response via telephone was received by a man named Andy. Andy is a serving member of the police service and wanted to check the legitimacy of the letter. Andy was quickly satisfied and with guards lowered he accepted the story and confirmed that June was very much still alive and well. He also confirmed he was born in late 1967 and Margaret's womans intuition was correct.

He confirmed that the family had received the previous emails but were concerned about a possible scam so chose to ignore them. However, crucially, within the later letter written to the family mention was made of June’s purchase of the table and chairs as a gift following the meeting in 1967. This led the family to believe that the approach was genuine which prompted Andy’s call.

With everybody satisfied then Jim granted permission for his number to be passed to June and was expecting a call the next day but it didn’t happen. After recontacting Andy he advised June was in such a state of shock (happy shock!) that she had picked the phone up a number of times that day but was just too nervous to dial. We simply advised that Jim was a great person, with fond memories of June and that he was there waiting if she wanted to make contact. The very next day she did and they met a month later and have remained in contact since with a wonderful image of their meeting shown below.

Another family finder success story.

This search for a long lost step cousin was successful for a number of reasons:

Firstly Jim remembering the name of his cousin.

Secondly there was a stroke of luck in that Elizabeth’s “womens intuition” had been correct.

It was also successful because of our skills in hunting down records.

If you have a long lost relative you would like to find please contact us on the form below including as much detail as you have as well as your contact details and we will be in touch to see if we can help you have a similar positive outcome.