DNA responsible for reuniting siblings decades later

Milt Chesterman and his half-sister Carol Johnson met for the first time nearly eight decades after her birth. The use of DNA tracing through ancestry.com allowed the family to be reunited, interestingly through a family tie in Wales, where their mother moved after the Second World War. (Jeff Helsdon Photo).

Jeff Helsdon, Editor

DNA was responsible for reuniting siblings who never thought they would see each other again.

The story is the stuff that television documentaries is made about, and involves an affair in a time when those things were hushed up, mothers had few rights, an adoption, and siblings who didn’t know their birth mother and ended up scattered across the northern hemisphere.

Local businessman Milt Chesterman is in the midst of the story, although his tale started long before DNA technology’s use in ancestry was dreamed of.

Born in 1940 in Montreal, Chesterman’s father was in the military and away serving his country shortly after his birth. While his father was away, his wife had an affair and became pregnant. Returning home, the father discovered the affair, and took his three sons from the mother. While the older two brothers went to relatives, Milt was put in a foster home. After the war his father took the boys back in his care.

Chesterman said they all “ran away from home” when teenagers.

“We all left one at a time and went our own ways,” he said.

However, his older brother found him working in a factory in Montreal and convinced Chesterman to come to Southwestern Ontario on a vacation. Chesterman liked it so much, he stayed while his brother joined the army.

Chesterman didn’t know much about his mother’s family, but then in 1965 received a clipping in the mail from his father’s brother with an obituary for his maternal grandfather.

Then some good old-fashioned detective work started. Chesterman noticed one of the surviving daughters was married to a doctor in St. Catharines. Since he had a unique Polish last name, Chesterman travelled to St. Catharines, found his uncle’s office phone number in the phone book and left a message. Then he met his aunt for the first time. He discovered he had a large family, and his mother had remarried to a British sailor, moved to Wales and had four more children.

“That’s how I discovered about my family in Wales and my mother,” he said.

Chesterman met his mother when she came to visit his aunt two years later.

“There’s no grudges, things were different in the war,” he said of the relationship that developed with his mother and his new siblings.

Little was said about the sister, though, who was the product of the affair, and put up for adoption, except for a small slip-up by his aunt.

“Nobody would talk about it so you couldn’t go down that alley to find the story,” he said.

Carol’s story

Carol Johnson grew up knowing she was adopted.

“I remember my mother was my adopted mother,” she said. “She asked me on a number of occasions if I wanted information on my biological family.”

Johnson was too young to understand the whole situation, but was happy growing up with her adopted parents in St. Lambert, on the south shore of Montreal. All she knew was the Montreal hospital where she was born in 1942.

As an adult, she was a school principal, was married and had her own children. Out of respect for adopted parents, she didn’t pursue her roots.

Then, after her parents passed away, she decided to look into her past at the urging of her husband.

Johnson wrote the Department of Social Affairs in Quebec to seek information on her birth mother, knowing only her date of birth and she was born in Notre Dame Hospital. She was told her mother’s maiden name was Dorothy Bailey and the father was unknown, but they could divulge no more without a request from the mother.

“They said if they ever have a request from the other side, they would put us together,” Johnson said.

What she didn’t know was that wasn’t going to happen as her mother had moved to Wales after she was born.

As searching for ancestry through DNA grew in popularity, Johnson decided to pursue this route and sent in her DNA about four years ago. She started receiving names from the process, which would say they were fifth or sixth cousins.

Then she got a closer response – her son. He encouraged her to continue exploring their roots.

“Unknown to me, my son had sent it in because ancestry was a thing,” she said. “It made it believable to me.”

This was followed by a message that came through from the second name on the list, after her son, saying he believed Johnson was his aunt.

“It was going from the unknown to the known, that was scary,” she said.

Her nephew from Wales started calling the relatives in the United Kingdom and reached out to Chesterman as well, putting them all in contact. Finally, the mystery of her birth started to come together.

“Everybody I talked to, or wrote to, gave me a piece of the puzzle,” she said.

Since then, Johnson has met Milt, Ilene and their family. Johnson also travelled to Wales and met her two sisters and one brother living in Wales. She also discovered she had a sister that died two to three years earlier.

“I was an only child for all my life until I was almost 80, then all a sudden I have all these siblings, and nieces and nephews,” she said.

Johnson visited the Chestermans recently, and while here, shared her story about DNA and ancestry during a presentation to Avondale United Church’s United Church Women.