Over 70 years on, I still hope to f ind my brother
A MAN whose brother went missing 71 years ago has said he hopes the increasing popularity of ancestry websites could help him finally track down his missing sibling.
James ‘Jimmy’ O’Neill from Leamy Street in Waterford vanished on December 15, 1947, while aged just 16 and is now one of Ireland’s longest missing people.
He had been working at a local shipping company and his family believe he may have ‘stowed away’ in search of a new life in America.
Now his younger brother, Frank O’Neill, has submitted a DNA test to popular websites that help families uncover far-flung distant relatives whose ancestors left Ireland years or even decades ago.
And after uncovering potentially useful addresses in the US, he has made renewed appeals for information in the US in the hope of getting some answers to a 71-yearold family mystery.
Frank, 75, told the Irish Daily Mail how he has written to a number of addresses he uncovered from ship manifests dating back to the 1940s.
He said ‘I have done a DNA test, and some distant relatives have come up, I am emailing them and hoping they may know something.
‘I am also appealing to anyone on social media who has time to email, tweet or post my brother’s story in the hope it may jog someone’s memory.
‘I don’t think anyone can ever realise what it is like to lose someone who goes missing. There is no end to the pain. It is always there.
‘People often say to me, “move on”, but I can’t. Life would probably have been different had he been here.
‘I had four siblings, and my parents lost two babies. But there was nothing like Jimmy’s disappearance. I grew up in a house of grief. It never ended. People used to say, my grandmother’s eyes were constantly red from crying.
‘My mother was a shell of herself, my father was a broken man. The pain was unreal. Someone somewhere has to know what happened. Possibly someone helped him to run away, and if he ran away, no one knows why. But none of us ever got over it.
‘I had a sister living in America for years, she looked too. There was no answers.
‘But now, I am appealing to people on social media, his story has gone up on an American website, and I have written letters to addresses in America and done Freedom of Information requests in the States. I just want to find something, anything at all.’
Frank recently uncovered on a ship manifest some US addresses that a man named James O’Neill travelled to America in 1952.
According to the manifest for the ship the MV Georgic, there is an entry for a James O’Neill, 20, and the entry rang bells.
Frank said: ‘There was a James M O’Neill on it. I thought I had a breakthrough. The age was right the name was right, his destination was New York… But it ran cold. We tried to find him. I’d love to find him, so I have written to everyone on the manifest.’
He hopes someone may remember his brother, and he has written to a number of addresses and hopes that Jimmy’s photo will be able to job someone’s memory.
‘Somebody must know something. He may have married and could have children. It would be a dream to find them.’
In 1947, Jimmy was living at home with his parents, Jim and Bridget O’Neill and his siblings in Waterford where he worked in a local shipping company, that has since closed down.
He is believed to have vanished at 6.30pm on the evening of December 1947, but the alarm was not raised for another 12 hours – with the consequence that Jimmy was long gone.
Tracing a young man who disappeared so many years ago is a tall order but Frank believes technology holds the key.
Frank said: ‘Social media and DNA testing, they are the way forward with these things. That is the way a lot of people are getting their information.’
Frank’s guess is that his brother sneaked onto one of the ships at the company he was working on and ran away, but he does not know why. He said: ‘I was only four when he went off, he was 16. He just went, he just vanished. He was working in a shipping company.
‘I don’t know how long he was with them, we think he had an insight into stowing away, he used to go to the office on the quays and into the ships.
‘I understood, [from] the way people were talking, he went missing and stowed away that night, at 6.30pm and he was gone more than 12 hours when the alarm bells rang. That was the 15th December 1947, it’s a long, long time to be missing.’
Frank said his family were ‘devastated’ and the home he grew up in was full of grief. He said: ‘My life could have been a whole lot different had it not been for this. I grew up with it. I was the baby. you can’t put it into perspective of what it consists of. I dread when I read stories about people going missing.
‘There was an element of grief in the house from the word go, I was the youngest of seven children. I have only one sister alive. It was horrendous. It never goes away.
‘I’ve tried Australia, America, I still cannot find anything. But I don’t plan to give up.’
‘There’s no end to the pain’ ‘I don’t plan on giving up’