WE ALL have skeletons in
the family closet but some
families live with ghosts.

MICHAEL BECKER
News Reporter

Family researcher Gwen Bragan
has been exorcizing the ghosts of
broken families and filling in the
missing pieces of personal history
locally for years.

Bragan’s tireless five-year
research on behalf of a friend in
search of a mother culminated
recently with the lost past of North
Vancouver resident Gale Humjan
coming alive in an emotional
meeting with relatives living on the
other side of the country in New-
foundland.

Humjan was separated from her
mother in Montreal in 1946. She
was seven years old. When her
parents split, Humjan lost touch
with her mother’s side of the fami-
ly for 31 years.

‘She now knows she has roots.
It’s really changed her,” said
Bragan.

Humjan was xept in the dark

while living with her father’s
mother in Montreal. ‘‘She was
always told that her mother didn’t
want her,”’ said Bragan.
Her mother didn’t make contact
over the years because she didn’t
think she had the right to Gale due
to threats from Gale’s father,’’
said Bragan.

She had been helping in Hum-
jan’s quest for the missing past
with tips on research techniques
refined while researching her own
family six years ago and working
on the case of an aunt with a
background shrouded in mystery.

But when she saw Humjan
discouraged and mired in dead-end
efforts at connecting with her fam-

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ily, Bragan became more involved.

“~’ve found in working with
people that when they go searching
for information and nothing comes
up, it overwhelrns them. I saw her
giving up, so I decided to help
her,’’ Bragan said. :

Humjan brought several clues to
the search.

She knew her mother’s name
was Bride Francis Kennedy. She
had carried with her from
childhood a memory of when she
was five years old and had taken a
trip to Newfoundland for her
mother’s father’s ‘funeral. She
remembered scenes of a house per-
ched on the edge of a rocky cove
and a large boat moored in the
middle of the cove with prisoners
on it. She remembered learning to
cross herself, giving her a hint that
she had a Catholic heritage.

Bragan advertised for family in-.

formation in Newfoundland news-
papers; she wrote to libraries for
information on the Kennedy fami-
ly and contacted Newfoundland
cemeteries for any trace of the
dead Kennedy grandfather; she
wrote to Montreal where Humjan
was born, contacting people who
Humjan thought were her parents’
friends; she wrote to all of the
Kennedys in Newfoundland she
could find.

Hundreds of letters and
countless telephone calls later, a
connection was made in Concep-
tion Bay, Newfoundland.

“The information was sent to a
veterans association in Conception
Bay, June ’87. A Holyrood man,
Fred Fleming, recognized the Ken-
nedy name and went to my Aunt
Julie,”’ said Humjan.

TESST LSE ASAE TY ILE EOF SDE IY BN I ZB RTE EE MOTE EIN BU tT

G

Company
made
PAGE 57

NEWS photo Tom Burley

GALE HUMSAN and daughter Patricia, left, display mementos of their recent reunion with long-lost relatives
in Newfoundland. Humjan had been searching for her lost past with the aid of family researcher Gwen Bragan

for years.

Contact was made with Julie
Boland in September. She
remembered Humjan as a child at-
tending her grandfather’s funeral.

But the mother and daughter
reunion was not to be. Bride Ken-
nedy had died November, 1986.

Humjan and her daughter
Patricia flew across the country to
reunite with Boland and her

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children in September.

“IT went to mass with my aunt
and daughter and lit a candle for
my mother.

My daughter is very proud of
her heritage now. A kid has to see

it to believe it. She’s proud of her
Irish heritage,’’ said Humjan.

See Connections
Page 51

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