Brothers’ search for long-lost sister leads to Blenheim
Paul Hopkinson was told he had no siblings. When he found out by sheer luck, aged 57, he had a brother, he found out he had a sister too.
And now, the reconnected brothers have a strong lead that the sister they never knew, Olivia Rose, may have spent many years in Blenheim.
But she was last known to be in the region in 2015.
Hopkinson’s daughter, Auckland woman Bianca Howlett, put the word out on Facebook this week, on behalf of her father and uncle in Australia, in the hope someone might know Olivia Rose.
Howlett said the family believed Rose was born in Rotorua in 1949, making her about 70 years old.
‘‘Olivia Rose, we believe is a first and surname [but] we don’t think that it was her birth name, and possibly not her adopted name either.’’
Howlett had been helping her father since May last year to find his birth family. Hopkinson lives in Franklin River, Australia.
While he made contact with his birth mother before her death in 2005, Howlett said she wanted no contact with her father and told him he had no siblings.
But a search of the mother’s name on an ancestry website showed someone else had dug into the mother’s family tree. That person turned out to be Hopkinson’s brother, John Lee, who also lived in Australia. Weeks later, Hopkinson flew from Perth to Bundaberg to meet Lee.
A DNA test confirmed they were brothers, Howlett said.
With Lee came the knowledge of a third sibling, a sister, believed to live in New Zealand.
‘‘John had been researching it before we had linked up with him and family members had told him he had a sister.’’
With photos of Olivia Rose from the family, Howlett shared them on Facebook.
On Wednesday, a former Blenheim resident who had worked at a bank, contacted Howlett to say that she recognised the photo and had known Rose in Blenheim.
‘‘She said five years ago she lived in Blenheim – she knew Olivia Rose, she was a client of hers, and she was living in Blenheim,’’ Howlett said.