A reference librarian in New Zealand spent more than 20 years trying to track down her birth father, and she shared her story with the Vancouver Sun.
After New Zealand relaxed laws in 1999 on access to closed adoptions, Heather Sumner was able to find her birth mother and five half-siblings. Her birth father, however, was harder to track down.
His name, Stanley Thomas Taylor, was on a hospital document from Ms. Sumner’s birth. Given the name was so common, she had a challenge on her hands.
She joined Ancestry and supplied a DNA sample. Not long after, she connected with several second and third cousins and a first cousin.
She was then able to ascertain that her father was born in Liverpool and later travelled to Australia and New Zealand.
He left New Zealand before her birth and spent time in Canada, but was deported from there in 1958.
To find out why her father was deported, she looked at Canadian newspapers on Newspapers.com.
His name turned up on the front page of the Vancouver Sun, published January 25, 1957, with a photo of a man in the back of a police car. He was wearing a fedora and his eyes were covered with a black bar. “Seaman Stanley Thomas Taylor, 27, of no fixed address, has been charged with robbery,” the article stated.
Ms. Sumner told the Vancouver Sun, “Never underestimate the power of a librarian. I had the patience and the persistence and I could think outside the box for where to look.”
Read more about this story of discovery in the Vancouver Sun and the New Zealand Herald.
