Kathy of Basildon reunited with her mother last Christmas after 37 years apart, introducing her for the first time to her grandaughter, Grace.
Kathy employed the people-finding expert Robin Brown, 87, who uses 192.com to search through the edited electoral roll to find missing family and friends.
Mrs McGoven briefly reconnected with her estranged mother when she was thirteen but lost touch again in subsequent years. Then, in adult life, Kathy decided to find her once and for all, and contacted Robin Brown. “Robin found my mother after just three hours of searching, said Kathy. It’s been wonderful to reunite.”
World War Two veteran Mr Brown runs his website using 192.com to power his people searches. In Kathy’s case, Robin was able to identify her mother’s address, by looking on 192.com to see who her mother was living with, namely, her boyfriend whose name was supplied to Robin by Kathy. Before passing on the address, Robin advised Kathy to approach her mother gently, by first writing her a letter of introduction.
“ I wrote a letter to my mother and within a few days I got a phone call. We just made small talk but it was lovely,” said Kathy.
Of the five applications Mr Brown gets a day to find missing people, he expects to successfully covert two of these, often reuniting people who have been out of touch for decades.
“192.com is the centre of my operations,” he said, “Giving me access to wealth of data, from telephone directory records to births marriages and deaths indexes, and the edited electoral roll, supplying names and addresses that otherwise would be buried in local libraries.”
“The people searches that give me the most pleasure are the ones that lead to reuniting close relatives who have been missing a lifetime. It really brings home to me how important the family unit is,” he said.
Dominic Blackburn, Product Director of 192.com said; “We help reunite hundreds of families a year and we are delighted to have helped Kathy find her Mother.”