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For years, the baby was little more than a whisper between women over a cup of tea. She was a feeling, a guess. Sometimes, her mum, a lifelong patient at a psychiatric hospital named Nellie Wilson, talked about her. “My other baby,” she’d call her. But Nellie’s family could never be sure - was this baby real? Or had Nellie imagined it?

This baby, if she was real, would have been born around 1954. Nellie was 14-years-old. Until then, she’d had a relatively normal childhood, her sister Mavis Snook remembers, although she was in “special” classes at school because of her learning disability.

But after Nellie left primary school, Mavis remembers she went away for a while. Mavis was only 9-years-old at the time, but she thinks Nellie went to stay at Titahi Bay, north of Wellington. She remembers going to visit Nellie with her mum, but only vaguely. 

What’s clear, though, is that when their father died later that year, Nellie didn’t come home for the funeral. And when she eventually did, she was different - she would cry all the time. A few years afterwards, Nellie had a “breakdown” and was committed to Porirua Hospital. She lived there for most of the rest of her life.

Mavis never tried to find the baby, until Nellie became pregnant again, years later, in 1984. She remembers one of the nurses at that birth saying something like: “Nellie’s done this before.” Afterwards, Mavis talked to the family doctor, who she’d known since she was a child.

“My sister Nellie is in Porirua hospital and she's had a baby,” she said to him. “I believe she might have had a baby before.”

But the doctor told her it was best to “leave things alone.”

Mavis was furious, but didn’t take it any further, until that child born in 1984 - now a woman called Sarah - came looking for her birth family after Nellie had already died.

Sarah, whose last name we aren’t using to protect the identity of her adoptive family, is the subject of an RNZ investigative podcast called Nellie’s Baby, where she strives to uncover the truth about her mother’s life.

As part of that process, Sarah tried to find Nellie’s possible first child. She had one advantage that Mavis didn’t - Sarah had applied for and received Nellie’s coronial file. And in that file, there were six separate mentions of a baby, including a birth date, even though the Coroner’s office had blacked the date out.

“I was like, well, that's interesting, because obviously, that's them admitting there is another child somewhere,” Sarah says. “And I'd love to know, I'd love to know where she went.”

The file also revealed another clue: the first baby was repeatedly referred to as a girl.

To find her possible sister, Sarah began by using a DNA test, but there wasn’t a clear match. 

Then, she tried the Births, Deaths and Marriages office at the Department of Internal Affairs. But after hours on hold and various unsuccessful attempts at searching the database, Sarah gave up.

Genealogist Fran Tyler, who helps people track down their long-lost family members, says that experience isn’t unusual.

“Birth, marriage and death records are public, so the public should be able to access those,” she says. “But the wording of the legislation makes it quite difficult - you actually have to have the full name of the person you’re searching for.”

Sarah, clearly, didn’t know her potential sibling’s name. She didn’t even know if 1954 was the right year - it was largely just a guess.

In some cases, it is possible to search hardcopy birth records, Tyler says. But because Wilson is a common last name, it makes it difficult - there are hundreds of records. And it isn’t guaranteed a birth would even be there.

“Not all births were necessarily recorded as they were technically supposed to be,” Tyler says. “Especially if the child was adopted out.”

Finally, Sarah decided to look through the records of the unwed mothers’ homes from the 1950s.

These homes, usually run by charities or churches, were a kind of combination of maternity hospital and adoption agency.

They sprang up largely after the Second World War, when a rise in concern about the “morality” of unmarried women raising children led to a huge growth in the number of adoptions. 

The state, and churches, argued that most unmarried mothers were not bad or immoral, but nice girls who had made a mistake and deserved a second chance. 

According to adoption researcher Anne Else, married couples without children were encouraged to adopt, and unmarried mothers were seen as selfish if they did not give their children the opportunity of a ‘normal’ family life.

This situation was exacerbated by the fact that until at least the 1960s contraceptives weren’t readily available for anyone who wasn’t married. In fact, it was illegal to even discuss contraception with anyone under 16 until 1989. Abortion was also illegal.

Inevitably, young women became pregnant. And as soon as they did, they’d be whisked away to an unwed mothers home and advised to give the child up for adoption. This period, from the 1950s to 1970s, became known as the era of the “baby scoop.”

Some women have given evidence to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care that they had no option to keep their babies even if they wanted to. The commission heard from many women who said they were “treated with contempt and subjected to physical, emotional and sexual abuse, then coerced or deceived into giving their babies up for adoption.”

One survivor, Mrs D, said the matron at the home run by the St Mary’s Homes Trust Board in Auckland “punched me and slapped me as I was in labour”, then forcibly removed the baby against her will immediately after the birth. Many women have spoken of their grief and regret at being separated from their children. 

Mrs D told the commission of the lengths she went to track down her son, and of her experience speaking to the mother who adopted her baby years later.

“The mother … said she had been waiting for a call from me for 30 years. She told me she had paid $200 to the matron at St Mary’s to buy my son to replace her baby that was stillborn.”

In search of Nellie’s first baby

But Sarah was unable to find her sibling among the records of any of the Wellington homes. 

It’s possible that if Nellie was pregnant and gave birth, she did it in a private home instead.

Maggie Wilkinson, a survivor of the St Mary’s Home for Unwed Mothers, says there used to be advertisements in the papers for places to stay for pregnant girls, usually in the country. The women could work as maids, she says.

“Many of those girls were treated like slaves, or sexually abused, although there were some good ones.”

But she says it’s also possible that the child simply wasn’t registered in accordance with adoption law. Multiple women gave evidence to the commission that the matron at St Mary’s, for example, was giving babies away at the door, or to her friends, rather than going through the proper process.

Wilkinson, 80, who has been fighting the state for an apology for women forced to give up their children for decades, says if the birth of Nellie’s first child was hidden, that would have been “horribly normal”. She says there were numerous young girls like Nellie at St Mary’s with intellectual impairment who were all underage.

“We were treated like sinners - but what about the men? There should have been police investigations but of course there weren’t,” Wilkinson says.

The family doctor refusing to talk about that possible first baby was also commonplace.

“We were all silenced. No one wanted you to talk about it,” she says. “As long as you kept quiet, everything was OK.”

As for Sarah, her last resort now would be to take a case to Family Court to find her possible sibling. Unlike with birth parents or adopted children, adopted siblings have no inherent right to see their brother or sister’s file. Instead, they have to argue to a judge that there are “special reasons” for them to have information about their sibling - a step which not only requires money, but time.

Sarah is instead hoping that the DNA test will eventually throw up the answer she is hoping for.

“I think someone, somewhere will know who my sister is,” she says. “I believe she’s out there. I think she did survive.”

Writer / Presenter:

Kirsty Johnston

Executive Producer:

Tim Watkin
John Hartevelt

Producers:

William Ray
Justin Gregory

Sound Engineers:

Phil Benge
William Saunders
Justin Gregory
Marc Chesterman

Production Coordinator:

Briana Juretich

Visuals:

Cole Eastham-Farrelly
Angus Dreaver

Design:

RNZ