When Bermuda born adoptee Heather Reece Jewell Desabrais first contacted her biological siblings they were astonished but pleased to meet her. More surprises lay in wait for them all, however, when Ms Desabrais discovered they all had two more siblings given up for adoption. Now she is trying to find them so that her siblings can finally be fully reunited.

Ms Desabrais is the biological daughter of Mabel Reece Jewell born in 1923 in Bermuda. Ms Desabrais was married to American William Jewell and had three children. They divorced and she fell on hard times when she had several more children.

Ms Desabrais was born in King Edward VII Memorial Hospital on June 12, 1953. She was adopted by D’Angeville Desabrais and Corita Forsyth Desabrais. Mr Desabrais was a Canadian working at the Hamilton Princess and Corita Desabrais was originally from the Bahamas.

“As soon as they were given permission they took me to Canada, where I was raised,” said Ms Desabrais. “The adoption papers were arranged before I left the hospital. My adopted parents learned of me through a work colleague. We think that Mabel may have opted for adoption because she was struggling financially and had already given two children to the Ridgeway Home.”

Mabel is known to have worked at Robinson’s Drugstore in St George in the 1950s. She later married Chester Tomaszewski and moved to the United States where she had two more children with her new husband. She died in Syracuse, New York in 1983. Through birth records Ms Desabrais discovered that she had two younger siblings who were also given up for adoption: William M Reece born May 12, 1950 and Engeline T Reece born November 28, 1951.

“We believe they may have been given to the Ridgeway Home,” she said. “My other siblings had no idea. I’m the only one who has seen the records. Our mother never talked about it.”

Ms Desabrais said she was very grateful to have met some of her siblings.

“I felt a strong connection,” she said, “it was like filling a void. Just knowing that the same DNA was running through their blood was a special feeling.

“I talk to them every day. We have become very close. Myself and my sisters Linda, Diana and Maryann, will be in Bermuda on August 30. It is a pilgrimage for them as they have never been back.”

Her adoptive parents had told her she was adopted and had siblings. She visited Bermuda in 1999 to try to track down her roots. She learned that her mother and siblings had left the Island.

“All this information was given to me by an aunt, Florence Reece, that I found there,” she said. “Although she gave me many pictures of my mother and the children I had no contact information. And, at that time, I had only my mother’s birth certificate and my grandparents’ names. Through an e-mail search I found a nephew who gave me my brother’s address. I wrote him two letters to which he never responded. Disappointed, I then basically gave up since he was my only contact.

“The years went by and I never lost the need to know. It stayed with me as well as many unanswered questions.”

In 2013 she visited her aunt in Bermuda again. On that trip she collected all the documents she could from the Bermuda Archives.

“I was determined to find the others,” she said. “I needed to fill the void. It’s hard to explain the emptiness you feel when you are separated from unknown siblings. I needed the connection.”

Eventually, she turned to the genealogy website Ancestry.com.

“That linked me to many first cousins living in the United States,” she said. “So they were my first contacts. I also had the marriage information for Mabel and Chester Tomaszewski from the Bermuda Archives. Then I used other search tools such as Beenverified.com. Since I had obtained all the names and birth dates of my siblings from the archives in Bermuda I knew the age range to look for. Also with the results in Beenverified.com you are provided with a list of possible relatives. So that pinned down the addresses for me. One of my sisters, Maryann, had changed her name to Maryska. Luckily, she was linked to her original name in the list of possible relatives. Then I searched for her on Facebook and voila!”

Ms Desabrais wrote this sister a long message explaining who she was.

“She was thrilled,” said Ms Desabrais. “They had heard of a baby being given up for adoption. She passed on the information to my other sisters and brother. She organised a family reunion in New Hampshire and that was the first time I met them. It was a wonderful experience.”

Ms Desabrais is currently living in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She is a retired teacher and part time dog groomer. Ms Desabrais would also like to learn more about a lady that appears in a photo with her mother in the 1950s known only as “sister Pitcher”. She believes this might have been the midwife who delivered her. She can be contacted under her Facebook page Heather Reece Jewell, on 1-514-998-5554 or heatherdesabrais@gmail.com.