FINDING ROSEMARY

Rosemary aged 11 years

Rosemary was born in January 1942 and was adopted by Sydney and Rosamond Dibben in England.

In 1965  Rosemary gave birth to a son in Wellington, New Zealand who she simply named as "Baby Dibben" and she gave him up for adoption.

Last year I started looking for Rosemary for her son.

He had done a lot of background work years earlier but had come to a brick wall and couldn't get any further. He had children himself so wanted to know who he was and where he had come from. He had found a couple of marriages for Rosemary, the last one being in 1975 to an Alan White in Auckland. But then the trail went cold.

My journey to find Rosemary was to take me from one side of the world to the other.

I started by constructing a family tree and a timeline for Rosemary and discovered on ancestry.com that her uncle Harry, his wife and child had emigrated to New Zealand departing on 22 March 1951 on the ship "Rangitane" to Wellington. So they were living in Wellington at the time Rosemary had her baby.

Harry's son is still alive and living in the Hawkes Bay and a quick phone call established that he had met and known Rosemary  - she and husband Alan had moved to Australia. They remembered Rosemary as a very stylish person, who loved fast cars and drove a sports car but didn't seem very maternal. They even had an old address and thought they may have a photograph of her somewhere. They knew about the baby but had presumed since he was named "Baby Dibben" that he had died at birth.

All searches in Australia drew a blank - Rosemary and Alan weren't known at their previous address and did not show up in any historic or current electoral rolls, or property searches.

Back to the family tree! What about Rosemary's parents?
Using www.thegenealogist.co.uk  I found that Rosemary's father had died in 1967 in Newton Abbot, Devon, and mother Rosamond had remarried Alexander Gibbon in Kingsbridge, Devon in 1976.

Searching 192.com I found Rosamond on the electoral roll up until 2002 and she had been living in Devon. More importantly though I also found a Rosemary F White in Devon very close by and of the right age, living in Kingsbridge, Devon. She also appeared in a company report giving her birth date as Jan 1942, she was appointed to the company in 1995 and resigned in 1999.

A continuation of my searching led me to a possible marriage for Rosemary  in Kingsbridge, Devon in 1996, so I sent away for the marriage certificate. A couple of weeks later it arrived and confirmed that it was the right Rosemary. So I had Rosemary's new married name and an address for her, but she was not showing up in the latest electoral roll records.

A check of UK wills and probates www.gov.uk/search-will-probate gave me her mother Rosamond's death in 2004 and a click of a button later I had ordered her will. It only cost UK10 pounds and arrived electronically within the week. Rosemary was named as the executrix and benefactor of her mother's estate and it also gave her address.

I wrote to the address and a few weeks later received an email from ex-husband Dennis who told me he didn't know where Rosemary was but it was rumoured she had moved to the South of France.

So back to internet searching. I found a reference for Rosemary as a member of RNA Aquitaine in France. I emailed the club secretary and received a detailed reply from one of their members who had known Rosemary on and off for over 50-years.

Rosemary had joined the WRNS in 1959 and qualified as a Met Officer in 1960. She had been stationed with HMS Falcon RNAS Halfar in Malta.

At one stage she worked in the control tower at Sydney Airport and had become a helicopter pilot at a vast farm west of Sydney.

After leaving the UK in 2004 she moved to live in Normandy, France, and then to the Dordogne Region where she lived until 2-weeks prior to her death. She moved to Switzerland to undergo treatment for her cancer and to have an operation, which was tragically unsuccessful.

So Rosemary had been found, but unfortunately, she had passed away on 16 February 2012 in Switzerland. She certainly lived a full and eventful life. With the information I have been given  I was able to provide her son with an account of Rosemary and her life so that he could have closure. He has also made contact with his relative in the Hawke's Bay and finally was able to see  photographs of his mum Rosemary.