I know my Irish parents now
How DNA found on a stamp enabled a grandmother to trace the parents who abandoned her
WITHOUT doubt, it was a compelling mystery: a nine-month-old baby girl callously abandoned under a blackberry bush, in the middle of the countryside, on a hot afternoon in August 1937.
She was wearing a pink silk dress, the hem of which had been torn to tie her hands, yet despite being covered in scratches and insect bites, she was in good health.
Her case was treated as attempted murder and the story of the baby found far from any path or chance of rescue, captured the public’s imagination for weeks.
Her name — or the name she was given by the loving couple who adopted her — was Anthea and, for most of her life, she has known nothing more about how she came into the world.
What was she originally called? Who were her birth parents? And who had left her in such cruel circumstances? They are all questions that have haunted Anthea Ring — her married name — for most of her 81 years.
Finally, courtesy of the meticulous work of family historian-turned-‘DNA Detective’ Julia Bell — not to mention an extraordinary forensic breakthrough involving DNA taken from the back of a 30-year-old postage stamp — Anthea has the answers, or most of them, at least.
She knows she was born Mary Veronica O’Donnell to Irish parents — one from County Mayo, one from County Galway — who were living in London during the final years of the Great Depression.
And while she cannot know for definite who abandoned her, she suspects it was an unscrupulous child minder paid to look after her.
More than eight decades later, she is happily in touch with her biological cousins and members of her extended family tree — the first blood relatives from her past she has known in her life.
Though she has enjoyed a happy life, Anthea admits that the question of her provenance has never gone away.
‘There was a piece of the jigsaw missing,’ she says. ‘I used to say I’m not looking for a mother and father. I couldn’t have had better ones. I just wanted to know where I came from — it’s your identity, after all. Now, I just feel a great sense of peace. It will be wonderful to be able to share my biological roots with my children.’
AFTER a few months in hospital, Anthea was eventually adopted by Douglas and Margaret Shannan, a couple who had tragically lost their own daughter, Veronica, in a road accident.
While Anthea — who today lives with her husband Francis, 82, and has three children, Jonathan, 58, Christine, 56, and 55-year-old Juliet — knew from an early age that she was adopted, her parents had told her she’d been left on the doorstep of a hospital. Only when she was 24, married and a mother herself, did the truth come out.
‘I’d gone to visit Mum and Dad and taken some photos when, suddenly, Dad said: “We’ll have to tell her now, Peggy”,’ says Anthea.
‘My mother very unwillingly came back with a newspaper cutting with a baby that looked very like my eldest daughter, Christine. It talked about a baby left trussed up under a bush. Then they told me that baby was me.’
‘My mother told me I would never be able to find my birth mother because the charge was attempted murder, meaning no one would come forward.’
Anthea cried all the way home then, with Francis, set about trying to find out what she could about her past.
‘The only real option I could think of was to go to Worthing Library and look through papers from the time. But there was nothing — just the reports about how I’d been found.’
They revealed a tale of cruelty, but also good fortune: a family hiking away from their usual path, heard a baby crying. They took her to a nearby farmhouse, where she was given milk and brown sugar and wrapped in a blanket.
The only clue to the baby’s origins was the fact that she was clean and well-nourished. ‘My hair was washed and on my breath they could smell paregoric, a sedative used then to ease teething pain,’ says Anthea.
The discoveries only enhanced the mystery of her abandonment: what was this apparently loved and well cared-for baby doing dumped on the hills beyond Worthing?
It was a question to which, at the time, Anthea had no answer. ‘There was nowhere else to turn, so I chose to concentrate on raising my children,’ she says.
Only in the early 1990s did the question of her past start to rear its head again. ‘My elder daughter Christine’s son, Aaron, looked very like me when he was a baby. It set me off on the path again of thinking about who my birth family were.’
Library research took her to an adoption agency called Norcap, which advised Anthea to write to the police and the hospital where she had been taken.
The police put her in touch with former Chief Inspector John Hunt, the only detective who had worked on her case who was still alive. The pair arranged to meet.
‘I was really quite shaky,’ recalls
Anthea. ‘He was the first person I had met who was a tie to my past before I was adopted. He’d carried photo with him for years, which I found very moving.’ John, anxious to help, contacted fellow retired police officers, who published Anthea’s story in their newsletter. In turn, it led to further national coverage and reignited interest in the story. I' received a letter from the daughof the people who found me and was able to meet her and visit the farmhouse where I was taken. I also met the nurse who had looked after me in hospital,’ says Anthea. It made something of my life before I was adopted. These people became like family.’ Two key figures were missing, howr: ever her birth parents. ‘As the years went by, I didn’t think I would ever find them’ Anthea says.’ Yet advances in DNA opened further oportunities and, in 2007, after reading a book by geneticist Bryan Sykes about mitochondrial DNA, passed through the maternal line, Anthea wrote to him and was offered a test with his firm.
The database was able to detect matches with people all over the world and found links with people in Canada and America.
‘They were very distant matches, but it didn’t matter. It was a case of: “I exist”. I remember that feeling so strongly,’ says Anthea.
Then, in 2012, she learned of a firm then called Worldwide DNA — now Living DNA — which had an even larger DNA database.
After taking another test, Anthea matched with a woman in her mid-60s called Joan, from North Carolina: her genetic third cousin on her father’s side. ‘It was a wonderful feeling. We met when Joan visited the UK and I was trembling. She was my first blood relative. We got on like a house on fire.’
Further matches on the site over ensuing months suggested links in counties Galway and Mayo.
But they were all on the outer fringes of Anthea’s family — which is where Julia Bell comes in.
A former teacher who has developed a fascination with genetics, Julia has dedicated herself in recent years to making sense of the often unwieldy information yielded by the ever-increasing number of people uploading their DNA on to international databases and, after learning of Anthea’s case, she got in touch to offer her help.
‘We had pretty distant matches at that time, but I could see that she was Irish and had links in Galway and Mayo,’ says Julia now.
The name O’Donnell featured strongly, along with Coyne, a name that emerged on the paternal side after Julia found a lady called Dot living in Rhode Island who, through ancestry checks, she suspected was a relative. Anthea got in touch and persuaded Dot to give a DNA sample.
‘She came out as Anthea’s first cousin, which was the closest match so far,’ says Julia.
The Coynes were a large clan and Dot was the daughter of one of nine siblings — two daughters and seven brothers. It turned out that two of the brothers were living in the Cricklewood area of North London at the time Anthea was conceived.
After Julia painstakingly uncovered the birth certificates and baptisms for all girls born illegitimately in London between September 1936 and March 1937 — under the names Coyne or O’Donnell — one birth certificate stood out: that of Mary Veronica O’Donnell, born in Cricklewood in November 1936 to Helena O’Donnell, a 25-year-old from Charlestown, Co Mayo.
For Anthea, it was the moment she had been waiting for. ‘Julia rang me up last April. She said: “Are you sitting down, because I think you’ve found your mother”,’ she recalls. ‘It was thrilling.’
Helena had worked in a factory in Cricklewood, before returning to Ireland, where she married nine years later and had four more children before her death in 1987.
One of them agreed to a DNA test which proved that Helena was Anthea’s birth mother.
SADLY, her new siblings declined to meet her. ‘They wished me well — but they didn’t want to know,’ she says. ‘I think because of the circumstances of my birth, they are afraid of blame and shame.’
The question of Anthea’s father remained. While Julia knew he was one of the Coyne brothers, the man she thought the likeliest candidate — Patrick — died in 1999 with no known descendants.
Then, towards the end of 2017, Dot, Patrick’s niece, revealed that she had found airmail letters sent to her by her uncle. The minuscule amount of saliva left on the stamp was enough to test for DNA, a meticulous process undertaken by Living DNA’s David Nicholson. It was, he reveals, a close shave, but on the fourth attempt, it did: the DNA revealed there was a 99.5 per cent chance that Patrick Coyne was Anthea’s father.
Anthea is now in contact with many members of the Coyne clan and has met more blood cousins. ‘It has been wonderful getting to know them,’ she says.
She will never know if her father even knew of her existence. ‘Given how things were at the time, it is possible my mother never told him she was pregnant,’ she admits.
One greater mystery remains: what exactly happened in those nine months after Anthea’s birth?
Julia’s research has shown that, for a while, Helena and her baby were living at a home for young unmarried mothers in Chiswick, known as Devon Nook, before Helena returned to an address in Cricklewood.
Julia believes that, overwhelmed and struggling to make ends meet, Helena gave her baby to a foster mother in a temporary arrangement that was common at the time.
‘Records show there was a foster mother in Cricklewood who lived two streets away from Helena and had form for mistreating infants around Anthea’s age,’ she says. ‘She was known to make excursions on a Thursday afternoon, the day that Anthea was found.’
She believes it was the foster mother, not Helena, who so cruelly abandoned Anthea that summer afternoon.
‘I struggle to accept that a mother who had nursed her baby — and who went to the trouble of baptising her in a Catholic church — would be able to leave her,’ says Julia.
‘It would also explain why no one came forward when the baby was found. Helena was possibly told by the foster parent that her baby had died.’
There will never be a way of knowing for sure but, for Anthea, learning her identity has brought peace.
‘I remain very curious, but I’m not angry — in fact, I feel I was lucky. I had a far better life than I would have had in rural Ireland as an illegitimate child. Ultimately, I’ve found out who I am and that’s all that matters.’