JENNIE Workman Milne's family history is cloaked in mystery. Jennie, of Inverallochy, Scotland, didn't know she was Jewish until last year.

Jennie's late mother, Elizabeth Mary Lister, discovered that her mother was Polish, born Malie Rothenberg, who had changed her name to Helena Colomerecki before marrying a military man named Stanislaw Lis.

Jennie's newly-discovered second cousin in Ohio, Sandra Guilfoyle, similarly was unaware of having Jewish roots.

Sandra suspects that her late father, Wlodzimiercz 'James' Russocki, worked as an American spy after moving from Poland to America.

It's been a lot for the cousins to digest. Last year, Jennie telephoned Sandra.

"When Jennie said, 'You're Jewish,' I started bawling. I always thought I was Jewish," said 58-year-old Sandra.

Jennie, 47, is now trying to locate any members of their lost Jewish family.

She wants to learn whether Malie's younger brother, Henryk, has descendants and whether there are descendants of any siblings of Malie's mother, Francesca Rothenberg, nee Feige Dwora Probst.

Helena and Stanislaw were married and worked during the Second World War in different parts of Britain for the Polish military-in-exile. Helena concealed her pregnancy from her husband and colleagues.

After delivering Elizabeth in South Hammersmith on November 4, 1943, she gave the baby over to a private nursery in Hope Cove, Devon.

When the home moved twice and Helena didn't collect her daughter, the home's nurse, Rose Toms, raised the child.

In 1965, at 22, Elizabeth located her natural parents, who had divorced in 1949, remarried others and remained in England.

But Stanislaw died in 1967 and Helena disappeared after meeting the adult Elizabeth just once, at a coffee shop.

Helena told Elizabeth she'd searched for her after the war.

"My abiding childhood memory is of feeling a total outsider wherever I was. I simply felt I didn't belong anywhere," Elizabeth told Jennie before dying of cancer last year.

"Looking back nearly 70 years later, I can see how that helped to shape me as a person."

Jennie read her grandmother's file at the Ministry of Defence, leading to a number of revelations, notably name changes and learning that Malie and her elder sister, Rosa, were from Stryy in present-day Ukraine; that their brother's name was Henryk; that Henryk was murdered in the Holocaust (possibly shot in the ghetto of Lvov); and that the siblings' parents were Francesca and Pawe (Pinchas), the wealthy owners of a sawmill in the Polish district of Zolochiv.

Some of Jennie's findings meshed with what her American cousin knew because Sandra's father had recorded some of his family's information.

He'd even taken Sandra and her sister, Renata to visit his Aunt Helena at the nursing home in Lincolnshire.

Jennie has also gained information through Michael Tobias, the vice-president of programming for JewishGen.

Glaswegian Michael was asked to help by British magazine Who Do You Think You Are?

He constructed a family tree of Jennie's Probst relatives, many killed in the Holocaust.

If anyone can help, email mcohen@jewishtelegraph.com