Published: 10 November 2025
Last updated: 11 November 2025
My maternal grandfather Laurence Michael Barnett spent the 1950s as a committed Communist Party member, who also happened to be secretly filing reports to ASIO about his comrades.
I’ve recently discovered that wasn’t his only secret.
The first clue to a different secret history came when my Uncle Stephen spat into a plastic tube. The DNA results made no sense: 29% Jewish ancestry in a family tree we traced back to Anglo-Saxons. My uncle stared at his laptop screen for a long time, then emailed me.
"Either this thing is broken," he wrote, "or we've got the wrong family."
We had the wrong family. Or rather, we'd been missing half of it. The missing link was the real identity of my grandfather’s mother Jessie Sheba Barnett. Uncovering who she was would unlock the mystery behind Laurence’s compartmentalised life – and reveal the secret he'd buried deepest of all.
We had always wondered about Jessie Sheba Barnett, particularly her unusual middle name wedged between two common ones. We had photos of a dark-haired, dark-eyed young woman, but nothing else.
After Stephen’s DNA discovery, we began tracing through records and databases, trading census and shipping registers from the early 20th century. What we found challenged everything we thought we knew about our family – uncovering our unknown Jewish connection and a century-old scandal.
This Jewish woman, a Polish émigré via East London, worked as a 'hostess' alongside her Australian lover and his legitimate family
Comments4
Rob Kaldor24 November at 09:40 am
What a journey and so interesting to find the answers
Judy Stanton12 November at 11:46 am
Wow Dash! What a journey and beautiful remembrance. Thanks for sharing your discoveries
Wesley Parish12 November at 07:19 am
Interesting. I suspect most families contains some such secret in their back closets. My father’s family contains one such, though it’s not exactly the same – in 1860 or thenabouts, a man and a teenager made their way from the UK to New Zealand. Their surname was Levy, and the older man claimed to be from Krakow; he also claimed the teenager was his adopted (non-Jewish) son. My father had in his possession a Hebrew prayer book, with both ends showing the sort of wear and tear endemic to books loved by children. I figure that that prayer book, owned by someone nominally a communicating Anglican, holds the secret, that my father’s grandmother, daughter to the teenager, was holding to that remnant of Jewish faith in part at least to honour her father. Which means that Auckland in the 1930s held at least one crypto-Jewish family. This informs my Palestinian advocacy – why should Palestinians go through the same sort of thing my distant Krakow relatives went through? Once was more than enough.
Debbie11 November at 06:27 am
Lovely article, a thoroughly enjoyable read. Thank you for sharing.