‘We never ever forgot about her’

Family search for long lost niece in Cavan

An English woman, determined to reunite the family of her late sister, believes the search for her missing niece ‘Gillian’ may end in Cavan or the wider north-Midlands area.

Janet Mills never forgot the children her sister Ida Mary gave up. It was a topic rarely discussed, and certainly not with her. “They were different times, it was her business, we never talked about it,” explains Janet.

But behind it all, over late nights and many soothing cups of tea with her mother, she conspired and committed silently to reconcile the missing pieces of the family.

Janet (nee Holmes) was the youngest of five girls, and grew up in Paddington, West London.

There was an age gap between her and Mary, some 18 years. Yet as a youngster, Janet always looked up to her big sister.

Mary was young when she first married, remembers Janet. She had two children - a boy and a girl - with her husband, a man named Denton, before they divorced.

This was the first time Mary would separate from her offspring. Her children both went to live with their father, away from her.

Being only young herself at the time, the circumstances were never discussed with Janet or her other sister. Nor did she ask, feeling it better not to pry.

Remarkably, Janet has managed to find and reconnect with the children from Mary’s first marriage.

Her nephew sadly died some years prior, and incredibly when Janet found her niece, she was in intensive care fighting for her life in an induced coma.

“You couldn’t write the book on this,” remarks Janet, who identified Mary’s first daughter, Jennifer Titlow, via a website that matches disconnected families with missing loved ones.

Jennifer had been looking to reconnect with her lost family too but had come up against a brick wall before the online breakthrough.

“We’d found her and, even at that, we didn’t know if we’d ever get to meet, she was so ill,” recalls Janet of those tense few weeks and months.

Thankfully Jennifer did pull through, and made a full recovery. Together, they’re now “making up for lost time” as a family unit, says Janet.

They met for the first time around 18 months ago when her niece came to visit Janet’s other sister, Barbara. It had been almost 55 years since Janet had seen Jennifer. “She was only 18 months younger than we when she was taken from Mary, so it was absolutely amazing to meet her again.”

She added: “It was fantastic. We were just over the moon to finally meet her again. Unfortunately her brother has passed away, so I never got to meet my nephew. He was young, only around 55 when he died.”

Where Janet’s search takes her to Cavan however is through Mary’s relationship with a man named Pat or ‘Patrick’ Cook or Cooke.

Pat lived and worked in London as a labourer in the early 1960s, which is when he and Mary first met. They never married, but the couple had a daughter, naming her ‘Gillian’, born on the morning of July 17, 1963. It was the same day as her cousin, who was born later that afternoon.

On her original birth certificate, of which Janet still has a copy, her niece’s full name is given as ‘Gillian Mary Denton’.

From speaking with her mother, Janet gleaned that Pat had come from a “large family” in Ireland.

She still remembers that stark and fateful day when his parents met their family, albeit briefly at Euston train station in London, but long enough to take the little infant away.

Gillian was less than six months old at the time.

Janet recalls being struck at how elderly Pat’s parents appeared. It’s an image that stuck with her over the decades.

“She was only a tiny little thing. As far as I’m aware [Mary] and Pat broke up, but before they did Pat’s parents came over from Ireland, but we didn’t know from where, and took Gillian back with them. I think, from what we’re told, this might have been by her wishes, but really we don’t know,” says Janet.

It was a friend that suggested to Janet that Cook or Cooke was perhaps a name most common to Cavan.

“[Mary] never wanted to talk about it, but we always, always spoke about these children. They were always part of the family. The only person we didn’t speak to about them was our older sister because, well, that was her life. It was her business not ours. We didn’t interfere, whatever decisions she made, we had to respect those.”

Janet therefore doesn’t judge Mary too harshly, and encourages others not to either.

“Life is not always easy, and whatever decisions were made, she obviously felt were best for both her children and herself.”

Mary did marry a second time, and for 54 years she lived out a happy life up until her death in South West England two years ago. She had no more children.

It was only after Mary’s death that Janet set out putting a plan of action into place to try and reunite her family.

Three siblings have now been reduced to two, and there is a worry among all concerned that time is running out.

Efforts to track Gillian down have been hindered by the Coronavirus pandemic, so much so that Janet even enlisted the assistance of the Salvation Army, but to no avail.

She is now hoping that anyone in the Cavan area or surrounding counties might assist in reconnecting with Gillian all these years on.

Through conversations between Janet and Jennifer, Gillian’s half-sister, they learned that her family had been told Gillian had gone to Ireland to live with her grandparents.

Given the time in history when Gillian was taken, one of Janet’s greatest fears is the little girl may have wound up in State care.

“That’s our biggest fear, that she was put in an orphanage or ended up in one of the Magdalene homes. That has always, really, been in the back of our minds. It’s been a constant fear that this may have happened.

“But from what we remember, my mum says Pat had a large family, like a lot of Irish families did, so we hope more than anything that someone within the family, an aunt or an uncle even, took her.

“I still have her birth certificate, which tells me she was never adopted. The last thing we’d ever want to do is cause her or her family any upset or heartache. She might have grown up never knowing, and if that’s the case, this could come as such an awful shock.

“But if she does, and is looking for us, we just want to let her know that her grandparents, her sister, and her aunts never ever forgot about her. We want to let her know that she was spoken about on a regular basis, and that I promised my mum I would do my best to find her and tell her we love her.”

In her heart Janet hopes Gillian has lived a happy and comfortable life, one filled with love and security given by those around her.

“I wish nothing more, every day. The fact that she was so very, very young, was she actually told? Does she know at all? And did she ever think to ask? These are all questions we have. I don’t know. We’ll see what comes of all this.”