Worthing great-grandmother reunited with brother after decades-long search

Rosemary Ray spent decades combing through records without success and had almost given up hope in tracking down her sibling, who she last saw when she was six years old and he was three.

“I kept coming up against a brick wall.” the 76-year-old said. “I had more or less given up hope.”

A history enthusiast, Rosemary has spent 30 years researching her family tree, some branches of which she can trace back to the 1100s – but her brother remained the missing piece of her family story.

So she was shocked when, ‘totally out of the blue’, she opened her emails one day to find a message from her brother’s wife.

“I just sat and looked at it,” she said. “It was absolutely unbelievable.

“It was a bit like if you win the lottery, you sit there and think, I really can’t believe it.”

She discovered that her brother, Stuart, a father of three, had changed his surname in the 60s – making it very unlikely she would ever have managed to find him.

Ironically, Stuart’s wife Maria managed to track down Rosemary through ancestry.co.uk just a week after joining the site.

Two Sundays ago, Stuart travelled from Essex with Maria to meet Rosemary for the first time in 70 years at her home in Bruce Avenue,