An 81-year-old Englishman grew up wondering who his real father was. What he didn’t know was that an entire family tree in Canada was wondering who and where he was.
After being divided by a world war, an ocean, and 8 decades, Rodney Anderson has finally found his long lost relatives with the help of a simple DNA test, and a persistent, curious niece.
“I thought ‘This is a wind up.’ It has to be,” Anderson said, sharing with CBC News the moment he learned of his true origins.
“But it wasn’t. You can’t believe what a shock it is to get that knowledge.”
Anderson’s mother had a child with a visiting Canadian soldier during the Second World War, a secret that his mother and grandmother never shared with him.
He grew up with no knowledge or explanation of his father’s origins whatsoever because of the stigma attached at the time to these out-of-wedlock births, even though they came about during a period of immense crisis and uncertainty about the future.
Canadian Bethany Allen began searching in 2008 for this mystery uncle of hers after discovering in divorce papers that her grandfather, Charles Blakney, had had a child with a woman in the UK in 1944.
He had first sailed off to war in 1942, leaving behind a wife and daughter in New Brunswick. Blakney served as a motor and driver mechanic with the New Brunswick Rangers and returned home in 1945, the same year that Rodney Anderson was born in Farnham to his mother Yvonne. Rumors of his affair overseas remained in the family long after the guns fell silent in Europe.
“My mother [Rodney’s half-sister] had always wanted to know that [Anderson] had a good life and was happy,” Bethany Allen told CBC News.
It took a long time to confirm the link between the Blakney family in Canada and Anderson in Surrey. It came about through a commercial DNA test from Ancestry.
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“I was like, oh my god, there he is,” Allen said, after Ancestry’s service flagged him as an immediate relative. “Oh my god, his name is Rodney!”
One fateful day, Allen contacted Anderson’s daughter, Dawn Roberts through Ancestry, and explained everything. Anderson had also taken a commercial DNA test years earlier trying to find out more about his father.
As in other cases on which GNN has reported, the feeling Anderson and his other half-sister Barb Lowe [Bethany’s aunt] have when they talk on the phone is one of immediate familiarity. They share a similar sense of humor, and Lowe said that Anderson has the “same ears” as his father, Charles.
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Also like Charles, Anderson became an auto mechanic, even after he lost both his left eye and left arm in a childhood railway accident.
“Isn’t it strange?” Anderson said.
He has already bought a plane ticket for himself and his granddaughter to New Brunswick next summer for a reunion decades in the making. It’s a reminder that the bonds of family are always mendable, even in the face of time, prejudice, distance, and mystery.
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