Sisters Reunited – Remarkable Story Of A War Baby

Sisters Reunited – The Remarkable Story Of A War Baby – To Screen On Maori Television On Anzac Day

She was born in England of a wartime love affair between a Maori serviceman and a Scottish WAAF worker. Adopted to a family in Norfolk, as an adult Jenny Ellis began a search for her true identity, uncovering both a Maori heritage and a family living on the other side of the world.

Her remarkable story is told in SISTERS REUNITED, to screen on Maori Television in ANZAC – KOTAHI TE WAIRUA on ANZAC Day, Saturday April 25 at 3.00 PM.

Jenny’s birth parents met during World War II, her father, Bill Kereama, a New Zealander and a member of a Lancaster bomber crew, and her mother, Jeanette Stewart, who was part of the female workforce of the Royal Air Force.

The two were separated at the end of the war.

“Her father was a New Zealand Maori from Wellington, who miraculously survived 30 dangerous bombing missions over Germany. At war’s end, he returned to New Zealand unaware that Jeannie was pregnant,” says the documentary’s producer Dick Meadows.

Reluctantly, but not unusually for the times, the young single mother gave up her daughter for adoption.

Through her childhood, Jenny struggled with feelings of isolation and difference. She had inherited her father’s colouring, and even went as far as bleaching her arms in a desperate bid to change colour.

After Jenny’s adoptive parents died, she began a search for her birth family that would take decades to yield results.

Meanwhile in New Zealand, a half-sister, Sandra, had discovered a tiny, torn photograph of Jenny and begun her own search for her sister.

The turning point for both their searches came with the intervention of a third party. When Scottish school teacher Christine Scarles visited Sandra’s motel in Wellington and heard the story, she vowed to help - and things began to happen.

Derek Jacobi narrates the story of how the sisters were finally reunited, and events since that meeting.

SISTERS REUNITED is a story told through powerful interviews, wartime archive, reconstruction, rare family photographs as well as footage of actual events as they unfold.

Ever since discovering her family, Jenny has been trying to gain New Zealand citizenship, but to her enormous disappointment, has so far has been unsuccessful.

“The story I am about to tell is an incredible journey, one that is not over yet. In fact it is only just beginning,“ says Jennifer Ellis.

SISTERS REUNITED screens on Maori Television on ANZAC Day, Saturday April 25 at 3.00 PM.

ENDS

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