Nella — that’s the name she goes by — was 60 years old when she found out she was adopted.
Shocked? Thirty-three years later, the feeling still reverberates.
If that news knocked her back on her heels, so did the later discovery that she was a twin. She found that out when she contacted the adoption agency in Winnipeg, where she was born in 1927. The fellow at the agency couldn’t tell her anything else, though, didn’t even know if her twin had lived or died.
But here’s the thing that has her hopes up right now, at age 93: the slim, slim possibility that her separated-at-birth twin could be walking around Victoria.
Why would she harbour that thought? Because three times in the five years since she moved here, people have told her that they saw her, Nella, out on the streets.
It seems she has a doppelgänger in the capital. She wants to know: Could it be her long-lost sister?
She lists the incidents that have kindled her fire.
“One time,” she says, “friends saw me on the Gorge. I wasn’t.”
On another occasion, she was approached by two visitors from Seattle who swore they had met her in Mexico when vacationing there. The Americans said the woman in Mexico had introduced herself as being from Victoria.
Another time, Nella was approached in Country Grocer in Esquimalt. “This young man behind me says ‘you’re my mom’s friend.’ ”
She hoped she could trace that last connection back to her look-alike, but the man’s mother had died, and he didn’t know her friend’s name. Dead end.
Those three anecdotes might not be much to go on, but when you’re 93 years old and there’s even a chance of such an important gap in your life being filled, you’ll grasp at that straw. That’s what led Nella, a month ago, to place an ad in the newspaper: “Looking for my twin sister born May 22, 1927 in Winnipeg MB. I would love to connect with you. Nella Ellis-Hatton. Reply to Times Colonist Box TC070.”
She’s too private to make her photo public and was reluctant to use her real name, so went with Ellis-Hatton, a combination of people from her past, hoping that the clue would be recognized by some reader.
Alas, no luck so far.
Otherwise, she doesn’t have a lot to go on. All she remembers is spending her early years on a Manitoba farm before the family moved to B.C. when she was nine. “I didn’t have a clue I was adopted.”
In retrospect, she says, her mother had a habit of deflecting questions with “Ask your father,” while her father’s standard reply was either “What do you want to know that for?” or “Just never mind.”
If was her father, she figures, who most wanted to keep her beginnings a secret. Her mother actually let the cat out of the bag, ever so briefly, on a couple of occasions. First, when Nella was 21, her mother matter-of-factly said something to one of her daughter’s friends about Nella being adopted. Later, her mother started to bring up the subject with Nella’s new husband, but then stopped.
It wasn’t until Nella was 60 that, with both her parents dead, her widowed brother-in-law decided the time was right to mail her the adoption papers that had been kept by his late wife. Nella was sitting at the kitchen table when she opened the envelope.
She was gobsmacked.
“I’m adopted!” she exclaimed to her husband. “I know,” he replied. It was only after she learned about the adoption that either he or her young friend divulged what her mother had once told them.
So that’s that. Almost a century after her birth, and half a country away, she knows it’s a long shot, but says there’s no harm in trying. It would be so wonderful if someone provided a happy ending for her story, reuniting her with the twin she never knew she had.
