It wasn’t until her adoptive mother began to develop dementia that Heidi Bellar began considering looking for her birth mother.
“I wanted to look deep inside, but I never wanted to hurt my mother,” she told CTVNews.ca in a telephone interview Monday. “I didn’t want anyone to think I was unhappy.
“I was happy, but I was missing something.”
Beller, 59, was born in Toronto and adopted when she was just a few months old. She and her adoptive family lived in Galt, a community in Cambridge, Ont. At the age of 12, Beller was told she was adopted. Although she did not feel inclined to look for her parents at the time, her desire to answer her own questions about them grew over time, she said.
“Sometimes you just want to know why you laugh the way you laugh and look like that,” Bellar wrote in an email to CTVNews.ca on April 27. “There is always this long question [of]’Who am I?'”
In December 2021, Bellaire decided to take a DNA test and received her results on January 3, finding that she was 79% Scottish and 21% Irish. After contacting some of the people who matched her profile, she was able to reconnect with her first cousins in Glasgow. Working with several of her newfound relatives, Bellar eventually gained access to his adoption papers. She discovered that her birth name was Isabel Helen Wilson and her mother’s name was Isabel Thomson Wilson.
Beller’s mother from the family is depicted here. From left to right, this includes Belair’s grandfather, her uncle, her birth mother as a young girl, her grandmother and aunt.
“I started crying because she gave me her name,” Bellar said through tears. “I believe my mother did it [to] make it easy for me to find [my family]because he knew he couldn’t look for me. “
Beller’s mother was about 15 years old when she gave birth, and her father was a teacher. With a little more digging, a friend of Bellar managed to find the death certificate of his birth mother in Ancestry.ca, finding that she died of ovarian cancer in the fourth stage at the age of 52.
The certificate was published by someone named Bob Shields, Beller said. Looking at his online profile, she saw that he was a musician living in the Guelph area who teaches at Mohawk College. After looking for him on Facebook, she sent him a message, which he read in minutes, Bellar said.
He said, “You are not my half-brother, you are my full brother and you have a sister. We’ve been looking for you all our lives, “Bellar said. “We both shouted – he’s just as emotional as I am.”
Beller’s biological siblings are depicted here, with Bob Shields on the left and Linda Keck and her husband on the right.
Shields grew up with his sister Linda Keck, who will eventually become an intensive care nurse at the Federal Emergency Management Association and move to Florida. After Bellar was born in 1963, her parents gave birth to Shields in 1964 and Keck in 1965, although neither was adopted for adoption, as was Beller. Belair quickly managed to find Keck on Facebook and the two connected immediately through FaceTime.
“We just looked at each other and laughed,” Bellar said. “I have a very strong laugh and I have it since I was a little girl. Well, she has it too.
“We just laughed and cried and it was like looking at each other [in a mirror]”
Now she and her birth sister are in close contact, talking to each other several times a week, Bellar said.
Despite the sadness that came with the discovery that both of her parents had died, Beller said it was “amazing” to reconnect with her two siblings, along with nine first cousins and two aunts. Her siblings said they had been looking for her from an early age, Beller said, but had very little information to base their search on. Since then, her relatives have provided birth, death and marriage certificates, which eventually allows her to complete her relatives’ family tree.
Beller’s biological cousin, Laura Porterhouse, is pictured here. Porterhouse helped Beller search for relatives and find photos.
Bellar and her two siblings are planning a family reunion from May 26th to 30th, where they will gather at a campsite near White Lake, west of where Bellar currently lives in Ottawa. Keck will fly from Florida and Beller will pick her up from the airport. Meanwhile, Shields will be driving with his wife and daughter from Hamilton, Ont. Beller’s adoptive brother, Robin, will also be present, as will her immediate family.
“[Bobby and Linda] he sent me flowers and they said, “We have been waiting for you all our lives. We send you these flowers. But the real thing we want is to hug you, “Bellar said. “I’ll cry for days.”
While acknowledging that the upcoming meeting is stressful about making a good impression, Bellar said she was ultimately grateful to have gone looking for her relatives by birth.
“There is an honest sense of peace,” she said. “It’s a satisfaction I’ve never experienced before.”
Beller (center) and her two children are pictured here.
In the end, Beller said he hoped to meet with members of his extended family in Glasgow and other parts of the world.
“It really brought everyone together, all the cousins are talking again, and it’s amazing.”
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