A long-lost family has been reunited thanks to help from Express & Star readers. Women’s Editor Maria Cusine reports.

With no news of her family for more than 50 years, there was little hope that Phillippa Longley Ryder would trace any of her West Midlands relatives.

But in her determined effort and with the knowledge that they once lived in the Black Country she contacted the Express & Star letters page with an appeal for help.

And thanks to the efforts of our readers, she was able to track her aunt and cousins down and finally meet the family she never knew existed.

It has been an extensive and lengthy search for 51-year-old Phillippa, which has seen her travel the continents in search of her late mother’s family, who all originally hail from South Africa.

But the 51-year-old, who lives in the south of France, says the end result was well worth the wait.

Her mother, Eileen Mckenzie Jubber grew up in South Africa with her family, including older sister Marjorie. But following a family row, Eileen left the country for England in 1948 and unfortunately lost all contact with her family.

Sadly, Eileen died in 1989 without ever again hearing from her family. But daughter Phillippa was determined to trace down the relatives she never knew.

She visited South Africa and looking through archives she managed to find an address for Marjorie dating from the 70s – the address being in Penn Fields, Wolverhampton.

“We had always assumed that the family stayed in South Africa, but ironically I found that my mother’s sister had been living all the time in England – and not so far away from my mother in Oxfordshire, and neither of them knew it,” she says.

“I never knew my grandparents but I hoped that, with a little help I could find my mother’s sisters before it was too late. As I live in the south of France it was very difficult for me to conduct research personally in England, which is why I contacted the newspaper with a letter about my search in the hope that someone may have known Marjorie.”

And thankfully for Phillippa, a number of eagle-eyed readers spotted the letter and ultimately helped in the search for her long lost family. One of them was a former classmate of Marjorie’s children – Phillippa’s cousins.

“The first letter which was published led to a contact from a reader who had been to school with my aunt’s children and someone else did some digging and found death records of another sister and my grandfather.

“A second letter was subsequently published and this came to the attention of another reader who knew a friend of my aunt’s daughter Heather,” says Phillippa.

It then emerged that Marjorie’s family were no longer living in the Black Country and had moved to nearby Shropshire.

“The reader contacted my cousin’s friend who subsequently contacted my cousin. Then at the end of last year I received three letters from England on the same day, the first was from a cousin, the second from her sister and the third was from my mother’s sister, Marjorie,” says Phillippa.

“What a wonderful day that was.

“Never in a million years did I expect to trace not only my aunt, but find that she had family and I had four cousins who I never knew about. I presume she’d had children, but I had no way of knowing that for definite,” she adds.

Since then the family exchanged many letters, emails and photographs and earlier this year one of her new-found cousins, Heather Richards, of Myddle near Shrewsbury, visited her in France. Then this month, Phillippa, husband Richard, 52, and son Oliver, 12, made a trip to England to meet her 86-year-old aunt Marjorie, who lives in Oswestry, and the cousins she never knew she had for the first time.

“Meeting Marjorie has been delightful. We all get on very well and we’ve been able to fill in the gaps in our history, and more importantly are building bridges for the future,” she says. “My mother’s family has been a complete mystery all my life but now that I’ve found some of her relatives I feel that all has not been lost.”

Marjorie’s family moved to Shropshire around 18 years ago, but had previously lived in Claverley in the 50s, before moving to Wall Heath near Kingswinford, then they lived in Tipton, before moving to Penn Fields, Wolverhampton in the 70s. “I’m still in contact with some of my old school friends and that’s how I found out about Phillippa,” says mother-of-one Heather. “Susan Stephens, a girl who also went to Summerhill school in Kingswinford contacted a mutual friend, Lynda Dimmock, who lives in Wombourne, who I’ve remained in touch with and she contacted me in Shropshire,” said the 59-year-old hairdresser.

“Like Phillippa, I knew very little about my mother’s family and I was over the moon to make contact,” she says. It’s been a very emotional time for us all, especially for my mother, who is delighted to meet her niece after all this time.”

“We’d had no news of the family for more than 50 years, so there was no reason to hope that we would find anyone,” Phillippa says. “So the outcome has been fantastic.”

She adds: “I think it’s so lovely that Express & Star readers are prepared to help complete strangers. I hope our story encourages other people who are tracing families. After all this time you can find someone. I not only found my aunt but my cousins too.”