A pensioner whose brother went missing more than 70 years ago is appealing for people to come forward with information to help find him.
Jimmy O’Neill was just 16 when he vanished from his home on Leamy Street in Waterford on December 15, 1947.
His parents Jim and Bridget and four siblings Frank, Nancy, Jack and Noel never recovered from the “pain and loss” they endured in the following years.
And in another tragic blow to the retired Waterford Crystal glass cutter Frank, his last remaining sibling Nancy died on Christmas Day aged 89.
She devoted a lot of her life to searching for Jimmy and was in a nursing home when she passed away.
Frank, who still lives in the family home, visited her every day.
He said: “Nancy said to me before she died, ‘I think we could have a breakthrough with Jimmy, I think something could come up’. But she didn’t make it.
“She is gone and I lost her on Christmas Day of all days.
“Jimmy went missing near Christmas, my father died close to Christmas and Nancy died on Christmas Day. It is a horrible time for me as I sit here, still in the family home where it all happened. All that sadness and pain. That is all of them gone now. I am the last one left.
“I never married and have no children. I didn’t live to my full potential, because I grew up in the dark cloud of my missing brother and the suffering it caused.
“Everyone was so devastated in my family. It put years on us, all that hurt.
“Nancy was living in the US for years and she looked for Jimmy over there too. She just wouldn’t give up. No one did.
“My parents, I just can’t explain the pain they suffered.
“When my mother died the nursing carer said to me, ‘Who is Jimmy?’
“I told her Jimmy was my brother who is missing and she said, ‘That is the name your mother was calling all night before she died’.
“It was just a house of hurt. We all just lived a life of pain.
“My father was not the man he could have been. It finished them and I was only four so I felt it growing up.
“Everyone was traumatised. I hope to God in heaven Nancy is up there with my family and the mystery for them about my missing brother is solved.
“I did not live to my full potential “People don’t understand the hurt it causes you. I just have to keep looking.
“People say, ‘Move on it’s over’, but you just can’t and anyone who has a missing person in their life knows what I mean.”
Jimmy worked for a shipping company close to his home in Wexford when he went missing and it was suspected he “stowed away” on a ship bound for the US. Frank was only a child when he vanished and feels he has a vague recollection of seeing the face of a man waving at him at gates of his school.
He said: “I often wonder was that Jimmy saying goodbye when he left or was it just another day when he collected me from school.
“I often wonder why he didn’t come back to see me, his baby brother, would he not have been concerned about me?
“Is he alive? Does he have a family? I would love to know.
“If he went to the US, would his family not want to know where he came from if he had a family? You could drive yourself mad asking questions.”
A James O’Neill was named on a shipping manifest for the M.V. Georgio in 1952. Frank said: “The age and name were right but I got nowhere with it.”
He has done DNA tests with ancestry online sites as well as with the gardai, but nothing has showed up.
Frank has made a number of Freedom of Information requests to the US and he has also made a plea for help from the public on a number of US online sites.
He said “I wouldn’t be able to give up now. I just want to know what happened to him. I hope I live to find out.”
