Growing up in her family home in the northeast, Clare Reay knew little about her Jewish roots.

She had learned that her mother Evelyn’s birth name was Chava and that she had been born in Auschwitz concentration camp in 1945, and there seemed to be little more to the story that she would ever find out.

But now a genetic test has opened up an extraordinary and previously untold family history — and reunited Ms Reay with the close relatives she never knew she had.

The inspirational journey of discovery came after mother-of-four Evelyn died in 2014.

Thanks to a DNA test, Clare was able to discover that her mother had two sisters.

Evelyn had died sadly unaware that her mother Dora Rapaport had survived the war and moved to Austria.

There she met a Jewish man who was also a Holocaust survivor. They married and moved to the US with their two daughters, Dena Morris, now 73, and Jean Gearhart, 74.

Dora died in 1998, She told her daughters that upon arrival at Auschwitz she had become separated from Evelyn. She kept a baby photo of her eldest daughter as a painful keepsake.

Dena and Jean spent more than 50 years trying to trace their sister. Then last year, a DNA test via MyHeritage changed everything. 

They took a test in 2019. Clare, 53, received a DNA kit as a birthday present from her son in 2020.

She was expecting to receive a breakdown of her heritage and not much else. She never imagined her late mother had any living relatives.

“I was totally taken aback and to be honest with you very sceptical,” she said, recalling that when one of her aunts first got in touch, she felt “stunned”.

But when it emerged that Dora had lost her daughter in a concentration camp at the end of the war, “I knew straight away that it couldn’t be a coincidence”, Clare said.

As they continued to exchange further messages across the Atlantic, the resemblance between Evelyn and Dora became unmistakable.

comparison left dora right chava

Left, Dora, Right Chava

They noticed similarities in their looks, their “glamorous” sense of style, but also their “flamboyance” and their personalities.

“They also both had their demons. They both had husbands that totally doted on them.

“They were both not really interested in housework or cooking, [had] lots of sparkly jewellery [and] blonde hair,” Clare said.

Last month, Clare flew to the US to surprise her aunts in a trip delayed by the difficulties of international travel during the pandemic. She hopes her aunts will be able to visit the UK before too long.

She recalled: “We just pretended that they were having an interview with MyHeritage.

“Then me and my husband just showed up mid-interview. 

“It was really fantastic. We had two brilliant weeks with both of them and met all the family.”

Following the genetic match, researchers at MyHeritage delved into records and found a passenger list from the ship carrying Evelyn from the French port city of Marseille to Israel in 1948.

After the war, Evelyn lived in an Israeli orphanage and was then adopted by a Jewish family living in the UK. The research team found childhood letters in both Hebrew and English that Evelyn had sent from England to her old orphanage.

Clare said: “My mother would have been elated to see that. We didn’t know that those things existed.”

Evelyn spent the first two decades of her life searching for answers, “but it was always a closed door. She was told that everything was destroyed at the end of the war,” Clare said.

The recent discoveries have been “incredibly bittersweet”, Clare said. 

“It’s fantastic to know she had a family, but it’s really sad to know that she didn’t get to know about them.”

The circumstances of Evelyn’s birth remain unclear, including her exact date of birth and where she was born.

“I’ve got a government document that says she was born in Bergen Belsen,” Clare said. 

“I’ve also got a document saying she was born in Buchenwald in 1945.

“The way that [one of the researchers] explained it was that at the end of the war, especially with children, they would falsify a lot of the documents to get them out of Germany.”

But Clare has one message for those reading her story: don’t hesitate to research your family history.

“You’ve got absolutely nothing to lose. You never know what you might find out. I never ever considered this could happen.”

Nitay Elboym, a researcher in Israel who worked closely with the family, said: “The Holocaust is considered a ‘black hole’ for many when it comes to researching their family history.

He added the platform’s technologies and tools mean that “people all around the world have the opportunity to overcome what was once a critical lack of information.  

“Stories like these are why we do what we do here.”