I’ve spent 30 years looking for my secret half-brother or half-sister. This appeal is my final hope
I’ve been trying to find him or her since I was 24. I’ve had genealogy people involved and they hit a brick wall
An offhand remark by a man in a pub in the early 1990s has set Leicester man John O’Donovan on a quest to find the love child of his late dad. He feels he has exhausted every avenue in his quest - and has made a final appeal in the press. He tells his story to our reporter,
AGRANDAD who has been searching for his mystery sibling for 30 years is hoping for new information. John O’Donovan, 54, lost his father, Jeremiah, when he was just 16. Jeremiah was working to install sewage pipes when a trench caved in, crushing him.
Seven or eight years later, John who believed himself to be an only child - was in a Leicester pub when a man who had known his father asked him: “Do you have anything to do with your dad’s other family in Bristol?”
The words stunned John, who set about finding his longlost sibling.
Now John has contacted our sister newspaper, the Bristol Evening Post, to make an appeal for help finding his halfsibling, who is believed to be the child of a young woman whose parents ran a boarding house in Bristol where Jeremiah had stayed.
John, a civil engineer, has heart problems and a recent health scare prompted him to get in touch with the newspaper and make a new push for information. He said: “I’ve hit a brick wall. This pandemic has reopened a lot of things for me. For all I know, this person might not be with us anymore. “That’s the worst case scenario. It would cripple me, to tell you the truth.”
He said after the initial revelation, the man in the pub had refused to say anything more about the other child.
John said: “It knocked me for six. He could tell I was quite angry and upset, so he clammed up.
“I was never able to get more out of him and he’s since passed away.”
John did manage to get more information from his mother. He said: “My mum took me to one side and said: ‘Yes, there’s a possibility you might have a half-sibling.’
“She also told me: ‘Don’t think ill of your dad.’ ”
BORN in 1935, Jeremiah grew up in Ireland but left his homeland in 1957. It was between then and about 1963 that he lived in Bristol and worked for a company called Eric Johnson and Stubbs.
He then moved to Leicester with the same company and he met John’s mother and John was born in 1966.
Before moving to Leicester, Jeremiah had been a gas contractor in Bristol and lived at a boarding house in the St Paul’s area of the city. The boarding house was owned by a Polish man and his Irish wife and John had a relationship with their daughter.
John suspects this woman was the mother of the child.
John is not sure what Jeremiah ever knew about the mystery sibling, who probably would have been in his or her 20s when Jeremiah died, aged 48, in 1983.
The accident happened just a week before John’s 17th birthday.
John said: “It kills me, really, because we’d had words the night before. I was 16, and I was going out to a nightclub in Leicester with all my schoolfriends.
“He didn’t want me to go, but I said, ‘Sod you, I’m going anyway.’ And I never saw him again. It’s always haunted me.
“The next day I was late getting to school because I’d been out till all hours. My dad had gone to work before I got up.”
John still recalls the moment the parish priest came into the classroom that afternoon, saying: “Is John O’Donovan here?”
At school, he was only informed his dad had been in an accident.
When he returned home, his family told him that he had died.
“I remember the lashing of the rain on the streets,” he said.
“I just left the house and walked for hours in the heavy rain, crying.”
THE search for his mystery sibling has been a life’s mission for John, but so far he has known only frustration. He said: “I’ve been trying to find him or her since I was 24. I’ve had genealogy people involved and they hit a brick wall.
“I’ve rung all the Polish churches in and around St Paul’s. I’ve been through birth certificates, I’ve looked for records of a Polish man who married an Irish lady in the area.
“I’ve always returned to it every few months. It’s always been lurking in the back of my head.”
John says this appeal is a final hope in his 30-year search.
■ He urges anyone with potential information to email: