After decades searching for his ‘baby’ sister Janis, adopted from the Fieldhead Childrens’ Home in Huddersfield as a toddler, 74-year-old Stephen Carter can finally say “I’ve found her”.
The former police officer and his two older sisters, Kathleen Dawson and Carol Lockwood, have spent a lifetime wondering what happened to their sibling after they were all taken into care. But this month they travelled down the M1 for an emotional re-union. It was the first time the family had been together for nearly 66 years.
“It was very emotional,” said Stephen, “but we all coped very well and gelled together; it couldn’t have gone better. Each of us took a white rose to give to her – Yorkshire roses for a Yorkshire rose.”
Janis, now Janice, was found living in Hertfordshire, where she is happily married and has two grown-up sons with families of their own. She was in her late 20s when she discovered she was adopted, and that she had a brother and a sister.
Over the years Stephen has made repeated attempts to find her but was told there were no adoption records from the old Huddersfield Corporation days. He realised that Janis, as she was, would have taken the surname of her adoptive parents – and if and when she married she would have changed her name again. “I thought that the unusual spelling of her first name might help,” said Stephen, “but her parents changed it”. He was also hampered by the fact that adoption details are safeguarded and only the adoptee has the right to search for their birth family.
“I tried the Salvation Army, but they couldn’t take the case because she was adopted,” explained Stephen, “and other organisations asked me to pay several hundred pounds for their services. I even approached the TV programme Long Lost Family and they interviewed us but decided there wasn’t enough to go on.” Back in 2010 The Examiner joined the search with a feature headed ‘Janis, where are you?’
Running out of ideas, Stephen asked for help through the retired officers section of the West Yorkshire Police website and learned there was a Facebook page run by a group called Long Lost Families.
Amazingly, within just a few hours of approaching Long Lost Families Stephen was contacted to say that Janis had been found. He explains: “I got a message from someone called Ali Chambers who wanted to check on Janis’s date of birth. Less than two hours later I got another message saying ‘I have found her and just spoken to her’. It just didn’t register with me that, after all this time, we had found her. I went away to think about it.”
In the meantime Stephen got another Facebook message, this time from a man living in London, who said ‘I might be your nephew’.
Stephen replied, attaching a copy of the Examiner article, and said: “If you think your mum can cope with it, are you able to pass this on?”
The following day a text message from Janice arrived, saying: “Your baby sister here.”
Janice explained that she was about to go on holiday to celebrate her 45th wedding anniversary but wanted to meet up on her return.
And so on August 12 the family gathered at a hotel in Nottingham – halfway between Huddersfield and Hertfordshire – and Stephen, Kathleen, Carol and Janice hugged each other for the first time since their days in Fieldhead. Overnight, Janice had acquired three siblings and a dozen nieces and nephews.
During his search for Janis, Stephen and his older sisters had agreed that what they wanted to discover most of all was whether their baby sister was happy. “We’ve always said that if we found her we wouldn’t push her, we just needed to know if she was alright,” said Stephen. “We’d understand if she didn’t want to meet us. Now that we’ve met, we’ve said we should build our relationship slowly and not throw too many questions at her.”
However, Janice has told them she had the ‘most wonderful childhood and adoptive parents’, which is everything they had hoped for. And she’s more than delighted to have found that she has not one but two sisters.
Janice was just two-years-old when adopted. Stephen says he and his older sisters only learned that she’d gone when they went to visit her one day in the babies’ and toddlers’ nursery. “We were informed rather brusquely that Janis didn’t live there any more,” he said. “No further information was available to us, despite us asking where she had gone.”
Kathleen was also sent away – to live with her maternal grandparents in South Shields before Janis was adopted – but Stephen and Carol remained in care. In the 1950s childrens’ homes were austere places and the siblings have many tales to tell of harsh treatment. But what distressed them the most was the way they ‘lost’ their baby sister.
While nothing can make up for the lost years, they are now looking forward to getting to know each other and becoming a family once again. And they’re also hoping to welcome Janice back to Yorkshire. Stephen says: “Janice wants to come to Huddersfield and see our old house and Fieldhead. She’s never been back – but then she didn’t know she was from Huddersfield. We’re so happy to have found her. She says she’s glad that I never gave up trying to find her.”
