A LEADING historian is urging members of the Black community to look for long-lost family members after he was reunited with his brother after a ten-year search.

Adrian Stone is the founder of Own History, a UK-based genealogy service that specialises in helping people of Caribbean heritage find their ancestral roots from their family tree.

But for Stone, it was difficult for him to find information about his brother, because his father passed away in 1980, when he was just seven years old. All he had to lead his search was a picture taken in 1975 of his brother as a toddler, which was given to him by his uncle, who said his brother’s mother was “white possibly of Italian descent”.

After an extensive ten-year search, he discovered his younger brother was living just three hours away in Birmingham. The brothers now plan to spend Christmas together and want others searching for family members not to lose hope.

Stone said he is the first Caribbean family member, his mixed-race brother has connected with as he was raised with the White side of his family.

Jon Paul Mazone admits the reunion was a bit of a shock, but he is embracing his new Caribbean identity.

 Speaking to The Voice, he said: “When I was growing up I was the only non-White one in my family. I grew up eating pie and mash and fish and chips and when I got to meet all my Jamaican roots it was an eye opener.”

Mazone revealed to The Voice that, due to his upbringing he had never heard of plantain. However, since connecting with his Jamaican family, he’s proud to say that has all changed.

He said: “It has opened my eyes, when I go to Bristol I am fully immersed in Jamaican culture. It’s something that I have embraced and it has really changed my life.”

Mazone was first contacted by his brother who sent a lengthy Facebook message in 2021.

He said: “I clicked onto his Facebook page and the second I saw him, I thought ‘Oh my God! He looks like me.’ We have the same head shape.”

To begin his search, Stone used records, registers of births, spoke to old family friends and even looked in past newspapers but didn’t have any luck. He decided to log into his ancestry account to look through his uncle’s contacts and found a woman who shared a lot of DNA with him.

Initially, he thought a family member had a “secret child” and decided to message the young woman who told him: “My dad doesn’t know who his dad is.”

The young person Stone spoke to was his brother’s daughter — his half-niece — who told him his brother was living in Birmingham. He later sent a direct message on Facebook to Mazone, explaining who he was and that he genuinely wanted to get to know him.

When we met we just connected instantly, and now we are super close. It was the most amazing reunion

Adrain Stone

The pair reunited for the first time at a family reunion last year in Bristol.

Stone said: “When we met we just connected instantly, and now we are super close. It was the most amazing reunion.”

Mazone said he has lots of similarities with his older brother, including having the same amount of children and even having the same front door number which he describes as “spooky”.

The reunion has answered many questions Mazone had growing up, and he now feels he is part of the community whenever he visits Bristol.

He said: “It’s like everybody knew me, they all knew my story”. Mazone only knew his father’s name but didn’t know him growing up and never thought of doing an ancestry or DNA test. But now he would encourage others to take a leap of faith and spoke of its life-changing impact.

The reunion will also have a lasting legacy for the next generation. Mazone says his children are also embracing their Jamaican heritage.

Research

While conducting research into his own family tree at The London Family History Centre and The National Archives, Stone says he quickly became addicted to “digging into records” and became the go-to person to provide support to others researching their family history.

He started his own genealogy company, Own History, which he founded in 2016 and described his work as a “calling from the ancestors”.

Stone said what makes his work different is that he finds “living family” members. The historian lives in Herne Hill, south London has traced people back to plantations and to the present day including relatives who were “living on his doorstep”.

According to Stone the Black community is inter-linked and it is up to the community to research and discover the intricacies of the connections.

The work he put into creating a family tree has not gone unnoticed. It is is currently being displayed in the Science Museum, which he described as “an honour”.

His research was inspired by his mother who became unwell in 2008, something which he says marked the beginning of his genealogy journey. In 2018, Stone did a DNA test to find out which part of Africa his ancestors were from.

“I’m 99 per cent African and one per cent Irish, and that is due to the horrors of slavery”  he said.

He later found he had family members from Ghana in West Africa.

 “There is a massive disconnection there between Africans and Caribbeans, but we are their long-lost cousins. My Ghanaian family saw me as a long-lost cousin and arranged to meet me last April.” Recalling meeting them, he said: “I knocked on the door and as soon as the door was opened it was just absolute love and embracement and it felt like I had found my way home.”