Amherst woman seeks long-lost sister
Forty years and counting and time is growing short.
At 73, Sharon Fairfax has decided to go public in a last-ditch effort to find the sister she has been searching for the last 40 years.
“I would look for a while and then give up,” said the Amherst resident who was born and raised in the Truro area. “Age does urge one on to finish a project they may have been started and set aside at times.”
Fairfax was 15 months old when she was handed over to foster parents by her biological mother. At age 14, she learned she had an older sister named Shirley but that’s pretty much all she knew.
While still a young woman, she got to meet two brothers, also raised by foster parents. She grew up, married and eventually had seven children of her own.
Through the years, however, her thoughts would turn to the sister she had never met and about 40 years ago, at the urging of her husband, she began the search in earnest.
Despite scouring newspaper archives, baptismal and adoption records and other channels, however, her searches proved fruitless.
“I never had the money to hire anyone,” she said.
Fairfax’s biological mother, who she ultimately connected
with, ended up married and living in Montreal where she had three more children.
Over the years, Fairfax built relationships with those halfsiblings. But with one sister still unaccounted for, her family unit is not complete.
“I always wanted a sister, so having met the two in Montreal, I felt it important to find my other sister, Shirley,” Fairfax said. “Not only for me but so she would know she has family, family that has been searching for her for years.”
Fairfax believes her missing sister was born in June 1942, in either Debert or Truro, although her birth certificate may show otherwise.
“To me, (finding her) would mean that the family is now complete and she knows who she is,” she said. “It would be amazing to locate her and I realize she may not even be receptive now.”
But Fairfax said it would be important to her if Shirley could know that “she had a lot of wonderful aunts and uncles … she has a lot of great cousins that she can still meet and she has nieces and nephews.”
“I find great joy in making others happy and I feel that she has the right to know her family, if that is important to her.
“I want to give her the same opportunity mom and dad gave me,” Fairfax said of her foster parents. “I had that privilege of knowing all of my relatives and siblings.”
Except Shirley.
As time moves on, an incident that occurred in the early 1990s, continues to haunt Fairfax.
“My Aunt Viola Walker, while living in Amherst, had a visitor that surprised her,” she said. “A lady went to see her and asked if she was Viola Walker, originally a White from River Hebert. She apparently believed this was her mother’s name.”
But Walker was not the woman’s mother and she was turned away.
Having grown up as a foster child herself, Fairfax often felt defeated by not knowing her full family history. And the thought that her long-lost sister may have gone away similarly “defeated” continues to bother her.
Fairfax had learned while she was growing up that she had not been registered under her biological mother’s name. Following the stranger’s visit, family members surmised the same thing must have occurred with Shirley and she had been following the wrong lead.
And that is why Fairfax has now decided to go public with her quest, in an attempt to extend a message of hope to the missing Shirley and to let her know that even though it was not her biological mother’s door she had knocked on so long ago, it was indeed the right family.