NINETY-ODD years ago when Dafanie Goldsmith's paternal grandfather Robert Bennett turned up in Wellington, New Zealand, and began to woo local lass Mabel Tonks, he struck her father as being so fishy that he forbade the match.

Mabel defied her dad and was disowned by him almost until his dying day. But even for her, the man she married in 1908 never changed that aspect of his character that made her father so suspicious - that he would never say a word about his past.

It was something 56-year-old Dafanie thought she might uncover with ease when she set about Down Under tracing the Bennett branches of her family tree. After all, on her grandfather's marriage lines, on his death certificate and on her own father's birth certificate, it said clearly that the reticent Robert was born here in East Lancashire - in Burnley - in 1880, the son of veterinary surgeon John Bennett and his wife, Lydia Ball.

But when she set about locating her grandfather's birth certificate, she was stumped. For though she found that there was a boy called Robert born to a vet called John Bennett, who was married to Lydia Ball, it turned out he was christened in Mossley, near Oldham, in 1777 -nearly 100 years before her grandfather was born.

Today, it's Dafanie's own birthday and she hopes that, with these clues, readers might give her a super present - solving the puzzle of who her grandfather really was.

"I am sure there must be relations still living in the area and they may have the answers," she says.

But because of photographs he brought to New Zealand that were taken in Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg, it seems that Robert and his family may first have left England for South Africa. Several are identified as being of his sister Nita and her husband Evans at their home in Johannesburg. Another, taken in a Cape Town studio, shows an elderly JW Bennett, presumably Robert's father, in the regalia of a past grand master of a lodge of the Manchester Unity of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. But though Dafanie has discovered there was a vet called JW Bennett, who graduated at Edinburgh in 1884 and was practising at his birthplace, Leigh in Lancashire, until his death at the age of 64 in 1927, this dues not square with him being the man in the picture of the elderly Odd Fellow taken evidently much earlier in South Africa.

However, other intriguing clues to the mysterious Robert's past - and a fascinating theory about it - come in a couple of photographs of him with soldiers, apparently in South Africa around the time of the Boer War of 1899-1902. In both he is in civilian clothes, though he was himself awarded the Queen's South Africa Medal having, according to its bars, served with the Artillery in the campaigns in the Transvaal, Orange Free State and Cape Colony. "I wonder if it is possible that he was an Afrikaner who changed sides in the war and maybe is why he came to New Zealand immediately afterwards and why for the rest of his life he never talked about himself. Because he changed sides, he may have been given a new identity - that of the Robert Bennett who was born to John Bennett and Lydia Ball 100 years before he was born," says Dafanie.

Fascinating - and if he had assumed the identity of someone else, why would he have been given or chosen this particular one?

If readers can provide any answers at all, Dafanie would be delighted to hear at PO Box 527, Warkworth, New Zealand. Tel/fax: 00649 4259225. E-mail: warkstor@pop3.ihug.co.nz

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.