The incredible 106-year mystery solved by genealogy expert
Weeks before her death Ellen Power, then aged 106, received a piece of incredible news. The identity of her birth mother was finally revealed.
In the end, she was simply and affectionately known as Nan.
Family photographs show a cheeky grin, a diminutive woman with a huge heart, dedicated to her kids and service to others. There are pictures galore of picnics with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, rowing on a lake, boarding a Tiger Moth for a joyride, and sitting on the bumper bar of a huge shovel-nosed car with her loving daughters, she resplendent in a summer frock and with hair swooped up late-1940s-style.
But anyone who makes it to 106 cannot avoid the complications of this thing we call life. And the wrinkle in Nan’s extended years began and ended with her name.
As a child she was Ellen Jean McGhie. Over time her first name shifted to Nellie. That was shortened to Nell. Then, courtesy of her first marriage, she became Nell Coomber. After a second marriage, she reverted her first name to its more formal version, and became Ellen Power.
A jumble of names. A shifting and complex onomatology.
Then in late 2022, in her Bolton Point nursing home room with its view of her beloved Lake Macquarie on the NSW Central Coast, an epochal event took place.
That was when her daughter, Robyn Snedden, sat down quietly with her and revealed yet another name to add to this mercurial list.
That name was Edna Noel Stone.
For the first time in more than a century, and thanks to her hardworking family and the modern wonders of investigative genetic genealogy techniques, Nan was finally gifted her previously unknown true birth name, birthplace, and the identity of her biological mother.
With just weeks to live, the missing piece in the puzzle that had been her long life was lowered into place.
Edna Noel Stone smiled and declared: “I am not a waif. I know I belong.”
Let’s put Nan/Edna/Nellie/Nell/Ellen’s life into some sort of context, if the mind is able to grasp it. And for the purposes of this story, we will call her Ellen, the name she had as a child.
When she was born, on December 23, 1916, Australian troops were still only halfway through enduring the horrors of the First World War. The prime minister was Billy Hughes. The silent film Murphy of Anzac had just enjoyed a successful run in theatres in Sydney and Melbourne. A few weeks earlier, in mid-November, Sasanof won the 56th Melbourne Cup.
The population of Australia, when Edna Noel Stone arrived in the world, was about 4.9 million. Sydney, where she was born, had 763,000 inhabitants.
What young Edna couldn’t know was that she had been given up for adoption at birth, and fostered by ship’s carpenter William McGhie and his wife Sarah. They named the baby Ellen Jean McGhie. She lived with them until she was three, when Sarah suddenly passed away. But Sarah and William’s daughter, Edith, who was newly married to Harry Morrison, took in little Ellen. For all intents and purposes, Edith and Harry became her “parents”. Their own two children, Tess and Jess, became her “sisters”.
For a while, the family settled on a farm in Grafton in far northern NSW. That’s when Tess was born. “Harry Morrison had come back from the war and was allocated a piece of land, as they did in those days,” says Nan’s daughter, Robyn Snedden. “Then they moved back down to Sydney (where Jess was born) and lived in a few different areas, mostly around Cronulla and Sans Souci. Edith had been sick for quite some time. She died at the age of 35.”
At just 19, Ellen Jean McGhie had effectively lost three mothers – her birth mum, who she didn’t know about, Sarah, and then Edith.
“So Mum had often been out of school to help look after Edith and run the family,” Robyn says. “Mum was virtually the stand-in mother to her two younger sisters and she and grandfather ran the home together.
“She was doing all the domestics. Harry was a milkman and he’d bring home his pay and they’d sit there with these little envelopes and put the rent money and the electricity money and so on in the envelopes. Mum learned to be a brilliant manager working in that way, and carried that throughout her life.”
To that point, Ellen Jean McGhie’s life had been harmonious and full of love and affection despite the early upheavals. Her family said her devotion to Harry “surpassed biology”.
Then in 1940, aged 23, she married Ronald Coomber, a construction engineer, and started her own family. Children Annette, Robyn and Steven arrived throughout the 1940s. She reverted her name to another variation of Ellen – she was known as Nell Coomber. Ron passed away of a cerebral haemorrhage in 1967, aged just 46.
But life moved on.
Nell would marry again, to Arthur Power, variously a storeman, driver and paymaster, in 1972. She went by the name of Ellen Power, and the couple lived at Coal Point, near Newcastle.
Then the inexplicable happened.
In 1991, aged 75, Ellen Power, with her children well and truly grown and with families of their own, decided to apply for her first ever passport and sought a copy of her birth certificate. She had notions of travelling outside Australia.
What she discovered changed her life in an instant.
For three quarters of a century, Ellen thought that Sarah McGhie was her mother. The document that came back from the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages told a completely different story.
“Instead of just getting her a generic birth certificate, she received what’s called a Declaration of Birth,” says Robyn. “That document came about when her foster mother, Sarah McGhie, registered her at six months of age. Mum’s actual parents were unknown.”
Adoption back in 1916 was not the formal process it is today. When the registry explained this to Ellen, she learned for the first time that she had been adopted out at birth.
“It was very upsetting for her,” says Robyn, now aged 78. “But she had so much pride that she wouldn’t talk about it to anybody other than us. She didn’t tell her husband or his family because she felt shame.
“So it was always a pain in her heart that she did not know her parents and all the thoughts that go with that. Why wasn’t she wanted? Why? Why didn’t she know?”
From that moment, Robyn decided to get to the bottom of the mystery. She wanted to find out the identity of Ellen’s biological parents. And she wouldn’t stop until the job was done.
Her sister, Annette Birse, 80, recalls the beginning of the ancestral odyssey. “It wasn’t so much that Mum asked Robyn to do it, as Robyn said to Mum – ‘Can I do this for you? I would love to try and trace this back for you’,” says Annette.
“Mum was perfectly happy for Rob to keep doing this. But it was without a great deal of expectation on Mum’s part.”
Annette says her mother thought very little would come of the investigation into her past.
“Mum wasn’t at all confident, and I probably felt much the same way,” says Annette. “I thought there was very, very little chance of finding anything given the state of public records.
“My husband had been doing an investigation into his family, and we found that often if you were talking about rural Australia, records weren’t sometimes done at all, or other times, you know, someone might have given birth out on the track and six months later they’d land in a town and they’d register something.
“And the other thing we found was that people back then changed their names randomly. So all of those things led me to feel that there was going to be a very, very slight chance of finding anything.”
But Robyn refused to let it go.
“If Robyn puts her teeth into something, she doesn’t give up easily,” says Annette. “She likes to finish a task. But this was a very special, personal task. And as the years went by, as Mum got older, Rob could sense that maybe she could just get one more bit of information. One more bit.
“Robyn’s daughter, Trudi, became fairly involved, too, and was doing the chasing. It became a very consuming imperative for Robyn.”
Robyn’s daughter was Trudi Baer, 55, and she became her mother’s sidekick in the hunt for her Nan’s antecedents. “In the early days it was like a jigsaw or a sort of Rubik’s Cube puzzle where, you know, you’d get this little tidbit and then you’d run on it and you’d find nothing,” says Trudi, who works at a high school in Tasmania. “It was frustrating and you’d be searching all hours of the night. Mum and I would swap phone calls or messages, going:, ‘Oh, are you up now? You know, have you seen this?’
“Funnily enough, Mum and I were chasing different things at times and then we’d link up and have a look at what each other had found, or the thread, and then we’d take off again.”
In the early stages of the hunt Robyn and Trudi kept Ellen updated on their progress but the discussions were sporadic. Ellen still carried the stigma of being adopted out at birth, common to her generation.
Still, amateur genealogy detectives Robyn and Trudi pressed forward, grasping onto any relevant strand of information, trying to build a picture of Ellen’s true descendants.
Months turned into years, then decades. Trudi says the abiding objective was to give the gift of identity to her Nan. But the clock kept ticking down.
“Nan was an amazing lady, as most children would probably say about their grandmothers,” says Trudi. “She was a nurturer and anything that you did she’d find good in it, and she’d help you to push forward, and she’d encourage you to do it.
“She was one of those grandmothers who had a drawer in her house and if you were doing something creative and you needed a feather, or a piece of string or a rubber band, guess what? You’d find that in the drawer. It was like she was made for grandkids.
“And her love of nature – that, you know, was instilled in most of us grandkids. She lived at Lake Macquarie. It was our second home. She’d take us out and we’d use a boat hook to gather bits of weed that grew off the end of the jetty. We would pull up this weed and we’d shake it over the water. And if we did it on the jetty and we had anything that we couldn’t pick up, we made sure we could wash it back into the into the lake.
“We would find little brine shrimp, pipefish, seahorses and other amazing critters, and she talked to us all about those. She would make sure that we cherished the life of those little critters and that we put them back and then we’d go and draw them. Or we’d talk about them. But, you know, yes, we were allowed to keep them for a little while, but let’s put them back before they die. Make sure you put some fresh water in all the time.”
Robyn kept up to date with advancements in genealogical research, particularly uploading personal DNA to ancestry websites such as GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA, used to track previously unknown relations and fill out the blanks in family trees. Others used the databases to research the possibility of hereditary diseases passed down a family line.
It took some convincing, but Ellen submitted to a DNA test for uploading. There were some distant matches in these communal DNA databases. Names that Robyn didn’t recognise. As for geographical locations, Grafton was prominent. But the data was difficult to interpret and nothing provided a clear path back to Ellen’s actual parents.
By late 2022, after almost 30 years of research – and with Ellen about to turn 106 – Robyn reached out for professional help. Ellen was now in the nursing home at Bolton Point and despite being in good health, her memory was starting to slip. For Robyn and daughter Trudi, it was now a race against the clock.
“I was part of a Facebook group about using DNA for genealogical research,” Robyn recalls. “A woman called Louise Coakley was mentioned as an expert who had worked finding the parents of adoptees. It was mentioned that she had become too busy to continue that kind of work, but I got in touch with her and said, ‘I’ve been searching for my Mum’s parents, and she’s now 105 … would you mind pointing me towards someone who was doing that type of research?’
“She got in touch with me immediately and I gave her access to our family tree and the DNA matches so she could look at everything.
“Within 24 hours, she found my mother’s birth mother.”
Louise Coakley, a genetic genealogist, has worked thousands of identity cases, both privately and on behalf of law enforcement. Police around the world are achieving phenomenal results, particularly with cold-case homicides and historic sexual assaults, using investigative genetic genealogy – in other words, tracking down offenders through their family trees.
That success, however, is reliant upon members of the public uploading their DNA samples to these ancestry sites and opting into law enforcement access.
When Louise received Robyn’s Facebook query asking her if she still did pro bono work for people trying to find the true identities of their forebears, she said “no” but suggested a number of avenues for Robyn to explore.
“Then she told me that her Mum was 105 and I responded straight away,” says Louise, who is based in Cairns in Far North Queensland. “Robyn shared her mother’s DNA results with me that afternoon. I didn’t get time to look at that data until about 8pm.
“By midnight I had worked out the two sides of her family where her parents belonged. But I didn’t know which one was her maternal family and which one was her paternal family. I gave up at 1am. I had to go and get some sleep.”
In the morning, Louise kept working away on the Ellen mission, aware that time was short.
One hurdle was overcome. There are 100-year privacy restrictions on birth records in Australia. Ellen had outlived the restriction, so Louise could access her information.
“It was just luck that I was able to view that information,” says Louise. “Then I actually found documentary evidence of a foster record, through the NSW archives, that confirmed Ellen’s birth name, her date of birth, and her foster father’s name.”
The critical online archive Louise had searched was the Dependent Children’s Register, originally a handwritten logbook but accessible online. She typed in McGHIE – the surname of Sarah and William – and got a hit.
“It had her name, her birth name, her mother’s name … that she was illegitimate and that [her] father was unknown,” Louise recalls.
“It had an address in Randwick that Ellen’s family were familiar with, and it had her foster father’s name, which was McGhie, I think it was William McGhie, and that was the name that she knew that she was brought up with.
“So initially it all tied in and that documentary evidence supported what the DNA was suggesting.”
Louise had cracked the mystery by 11am the day after Robyn had first messaged her. And those magical names were finally revealed.
Ellen’s birthname was Edna Noel Stone. Her mother was Martha Daisy Stone. (Just to confuse things, she sometimes switched around to Daisy Martha Stone.)
As Robyn and the family would discover, Martha was born in Brisbane. She was 23 when she had her daughter at the Nurse Gees Private Hospital in Randwick, Sydney. Baby Edna was then adopted out.
“Martha didn’t marry for another 10 ten years and had no other children, as far as we can see,” says Robyn. “She ended up going back up to Queensland and passed away at 99 years of age.” Martha died almost precisely when Robyn began her epic search in 1992.
The last thing left to do was to give Ellen her identity.
In late 2022, Robyn dropped in to see Ellen in her nursing home room with the view of Lake Macquarie. Robyn was nervous. Her mother was sitting in her favourite chair. “We had a little chat and then I said, ‘Look, I’ve got something to tell you’,” Robyn says. She took her mother’s hand.
Ellen asked what was going on.
“I said, ‘We’ve found out who your mother is’,” Robyn recalls. “I had a wobbly voice and I was very nervous watching her. Well, she exploded. The first thing she said was, ‘Oh my god, I’m not a waif. I know I belong’.
“She laughed and I told her her mother’s name and where she was born and we were getting a birth certificate. And that was just so important to her.
“It was an unbelievable joy for her. It was a couple of months before her 106th birthday.”
Robyn’s sister Annette says the moment was like a family “miracle”.
“It was a great gift to Mum, because before the DNA connections the investigation had hit a brick wall,” she says. “It’s been hugely heart-warming the way Louise [Coakley] just literally dropped everything and went for it because it was so close to the end for Mum and to be able to give her that gift. It was wonderful.
“Those words – ‘I’m not a waif, I belong’ – are engraved on my heart. It tells you that this has been something in her heart for all her life.”
Annette wasn’t there when Robyn broke the news to their mother.
“I was not there deliberately,” Annette says. “I felt that gift belonged to Robyn.”
Robyn’s son, Michael Baer, 57, a marine biologist (inspired by his Nan’s adventures with her grandchildren on the shores of Lake Macquarie) who lives at the old family house in Coal Point, says the bestowal of identity is probably one of the greatest things you could give a human being.
“Once that history was presented to her, she was like a young child that had just been given the gift of all wish-lists,” he says. “She was so overjoyed. She was bouncing. She was smiling. She was clapping. She was just delighted.
“I think she was overjoyed as much as she was relieved. I think it was a breath of relief. There was a bunch of emotions that had gone on.”
On December 19 last year, Ellen had a fall and was taken to hospital. She had a blood clot.
She was back in her unit on December 21, in time for her 106th birthday celebrations on December 23. Soon afterwards, she was diagnosed with Covid-19. She passed away on January 21 this year.
Her granddaughter Trudi, who had worked so hard with her mother Robyn to deliver Ellen the truth about her past, says the genealogy adventure was worth every painstaking minute.
“Throughout this journey I’ve learned different sides to my own Mum and within myself,” she reflects. “There’s this compassion in there, and wonderment and skill and just perseverance.
“But that there was love in what we’re doing I think is probably the biggest thing. We did this for love. We loved Nan and we had something that we wanted to give her.
“In today’s world with computers and what you can find in historic records, it gave us so many stories and we’ve learnt a lot about our, you know, different members of family – and they’ve brought laughs and they’ve brought tears and they’ve brought a bit of anger.
“I guess this is just a love story to, you know, to give back and give my Nan something. And a closeness to my Mum. It’s brought us together.”
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