An 81-year-old who never knew his father found his Canadian family through DNA

Rod Anderson was born in Farnham, England, in 1945, at the end of the Second World War. He grew up never knowing who his father was. “My grandmother, my mother, none of them said a word,” he said.

He spent 50 years trying to find out. Years ago he took a DNA test to check the man he suspected. They were not related.

A rumor in Canada

In Canada, Bethany Allen’s family had a rumor that never went away: that her grandfather, Charles Blakney, had a child with a woman in England during the war. He had served there as a mechanic with the New Brunswick Rangers. He died in 1987.

In 2008 she got his divorce records from the archives. They confirmed the baby was real, but not who he was. Before her mother died, she asked Bethany to keep looking.

This spring Bethany took an Ancestry DNA test. It matched her to Rod, through the test he had taken all those years before. “Oh my god, his name is Rodney!” she said.

She tracked down his daughter that same day. “I thought this is a wind up,” Rod said. “It has to be. But it wasn’t.”

The same ears

Rod now talks every week to his half-sister, Barb Lowe, 77, in St. Thomas, Ontario. “You’ve got the same ears,” she told him.

As a boy Rod lost an arm and an eye in a rail accident. In the 1960s he was told the one job he could not do was mechanic. He became one anyway. It was his father’s trade too.

He has booked a flight to New Brunswick to meet the family he almost never knew. “Never give up looking,” he said.