Find Living Relatives

I am trying to find out if I have a half sibling. My mother received a letter, I think sometime between the dates of 1961 - 63 from a woman stating she was pregnant with my fathers child. The only information I have is that the letter came from the North East and I think it was Saltburn by the Sea or Guisborough. My fathers name was Stanley Wilson and at that time he was a long distance lorry driver.
I would dearly love to know if I have a half sibling

with no mothers name and the baby's name will be impossible to find him, does anyone in the family know any thing did the woman who wrote to your mother give her name?

Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately I only remember seeing the letter in my mums hand and her telling me that my dad had made a woman pregnant but I never read the letter, I was only about 12 years of age at the time. I have no idea if the pregnancy even went to term and if it did if the baby was a boy or girl or even if the woman put my dad on the birth certificate!
Sadly, I have not seen my mums half sister or half brother for over 30 years but I doubt she would have told them.
I know it's a long shot but you never know, someone on Genes Reunited who lived in that area at the time may know of a Stanley Wilson who was a long distance lorry driver in the early sixties.

Have you searched for your father's name in trees here at Genes Reunited, Joyce?

If someone were looking for family, they might do that and hope to be contacted.

Do you have a tree here with his name in it? If there was a child, again, they might look for his name here. That is, if the child knows their father's name.

When you do that, make sure that you keep your email address up to date here, or use a permanent one like at Gmail. That way, if someone contacts you in future, you will get the notice (and be able to reply even if you have not paid up here).

Since your dad is deceased, you can put his date of birth here, just in case someone searching for him knows it.

You can also go to
https://www.freebmd.org.uk/cgi/search.pl
and find his birth record, and put a 'postem' on it saying you would like to meet his child born 1961-63. You have to put an email address there if you want to be contacted. So it's best to have a dedicated anonymous email address, something like stanley.wilson.family at gmail or the like.

Something else you could try, in case there was a child who is searching for your family, is DNA testing. I hesitate to recommend Ancestry, but I'm not sure what other firms would be good.

I use Family Tree DNA in the US, mainly because I started testing for family history matches several years ago and that was where the most of that kind of testing was being done. You could research it a bit to see what company offers the best chance within England. You can often upload results to another company like FTDNA to spread the net wider. The chance of success depends entirely on the person in question also testing to find family, and that is undoubtedly a long shot.

The only way someone is likely to find your message here is by doing internet searches for your dad, and unfortunately his name is not uncommon. At this site itself, having a tree and searching trees is the much more likely way of finding someone or being found.

And do internet searches yourself. With his name being common, it isn't easy, but you can try searches like

"stanley wilson" saltburn baby

and wade through results. Remember, even if there was a child, and you and that child are looking for each other, you won't meet if both of you post messages on line and then sit and wait for the other to find them! :-)

But do put messages wherever the opportunity arises, and search wherever you can too.

Unfortunately such slim chances - but maximize them by being 'pro-active'!

I just did a search and saw that this site has over 300 Stanley Willsons born 1920-1940 in people's trees. :-(

Born 1928-1932, 73 Stanley Wilsons.

More common that I had imagined even.

Thank you so much for all your information. My daughter who lives in Australia has been putting our family tree together for a while now, I know nothing about researching on any of these sites. Total beginner!
My dad was born 29th April 1925.
I thought it was time I tried to find out if I have a sibling and so I have paid to use this site in the hope I will learn how to do all of this!

familysearch is free and bdm

Joyce, you don't seem to have put his name in a tree at this website. There are 26 Stanley Wilsons born 1925, but none seem to be in a tree that belongs to you. That really is the first step for using this site to find or be found by someone.

I wonder whether, instead of putting his place of birth (which his child is not likely to know), you could put something like 'child c1962 northeast' that might catch the eye of someone searching.

Or just put him twice in your tree (as two different husbands of your mother :-) ) with his place of birth in one entry and that notation in the other.

Meanwhile, there are 26 matches for Stanley Wilson born 1926 here (with duplicates of course).

http://www.genesreunited.co.uk/tree/results/wilson/stanley?memberkey=0&yearofbirth=1925

We don't yet know where your Stanley was born (there were 5 Stanley Wilsons registered in the apr-may-jun quarter of 1925) so we can't tell whether that list contains any matches for your dad.