At 5 years of age, Sheelagh Gunn recalls, she was dangled over the murky waters between the Belfast dock and the ferry by an aunt who said "We don't want this Protestant bastard." The only thing holding her in her camel-haired coat was good waxed cotton and leather.

Meanwhile, her beloved baby brother Robert, screaming her name, was carried off by his father never to be seen by Gunn or her mother again. Her great grandmother 'Granny McCulloch' would say of Sheelagh, when she was but two years old, "The child has the sight," and of course that would be true to her birthright, the caul or veil with which she was born, a sign of a mystic seer -- a path preordained before her birth and one which she still honors.

The story that accompanied her in childhood was "a baby born with a caul (a veil) and two toes webbed, a 'fey' child," the old folk would say, Sheelagh's mother being a 'wild' child with webbed toes, long flowing hair and a pixie spirit. The child's birth presents consisted of a border collie named Prince and a lamb called Buttons.  She was always referred to as the "child" for no one truly knew her father. Or did they?  "It's the gypsy in that caravan," some would say (the dark mysterious stranger from Ireland) or was it someone of the local gentry as "the 'child' would have provisions made for her."

Sheelagh Gunn was so moved by our Belfast cillini limbo babies interview she contacted us, and shared a promise she made to herself after her mother passed to find her half-brother. "I have been told that I spent the first 3 years of my life with Nana in the village of Loans Ayrshire Scotland, just south of Irvine.  I truly believe my mother may have stayed there, too, until Bob came along," she wrote. When Sheelagh was about 3 years old. her mother, Jesse, who was also known as Sheelagh, divorced her first husband and married an Irishman named Robert James Morgan. They met while both were working in a manor house in the remote coastal area of Cariniehill Borgue in Galloway. Scotland.  Their marriage record states that he was a widowed farm worker and she was a divorced housekeeper.

The marriage produced her half-brother, Robert David Morgan, and for awhile it seemed he had what we now know as autism.  The family soon discovered that her mother had no coping skills and Sheelagh's stepfather Bob Morgan took the children from their home in Loans, Ayrshire, Scotland by ferry across the Irish Sea to Belfast.  She, her stepfather and brother lived somewhere nearby with Aunt Mary and her family  for the six months that she was in Ireland, but she never saw her stepfather or her brother after the incident on the docks in Belfast. By this time, her mother had another man in her life, and 6-year-old Sheelagh was shipped back to Scotland.  "I stood alone at the train station in the fog when it suddenly cleared and my mother was waiting there for me.  They couldn't understand a word I said as I was talking in Gaelic."

Sheelagh says her family's secrets and lies had created huge gaps in her genealogy, but now she is on her journey back in time to uncover the past and reveal the three secrets she has wondered about all her life: