Kendra Okolo is on a mission to meet as many of her Bermudian relatives as possible.

Doing so might be a bit tricky.

Ms Okolo, an American who arrives on the island today, believes she is one of at least 20 children fathered by the late Wilfred “Bubba” Burgess outside his marriage.

She grew up thinking he was merely a family friend.

Mr Burgess was a talented cricketer and represented Bermuda and also the United States after he moved there to live more than 50 years ago. He died in 2021, aged 92.

This is the first visit to Bermuda for Ms Okolo, who is travelling with her husband, their three children, her son-in-law, granddaughter and other family members.

“Anyone who wants to meet me, I'm open to it,” she said. “My life is an open book. I'm all about love. I'm not forcing myself on anyone; just anyone who wants to meet me.”

She naturally assumed that her father was the man her mother married but in 2016 her son, Max, asked that they do some research on Ancestry.com.

“He just wanted to know where we were from. So it was Benin, Nigeria, Togo, [some places in] Europe and then Native American. And then we let it rest. You have to pay to upgrade to figure out other stuff and so we let it sit and didn't even think of it again.”

About three years later, Ms Okolo received a couple of messages through Ancestry.com. Cheral Riddick claimed to be a relative and asked about her connection to Bermuda.

“I ignored it because I'm thinking, slave trade. Someone stopped in Bermuda, did what they had to do and then, you know, kept on to Virginia. I didn't think anything of it,” Ms Okolo said.

In February, after a conversation with her brother about his lack of progress with their family history, she logged back on to the site and found yet another message, this time from a woman who insisted she was a cousin.

Thinking it was “really weird”, Ms Okolo decided to pay to get more information.

“What I didn’t know is that when you upgrade it shows matches – how closely you're related to people,” she said. The first match was parent-child – it came as no surprise to Ms Okolo, who took the test with Max.

The second match revealed that she was Ms Riddick’s half-sister. Ms Riddick listed Mr Burgess as her father.

Ms Okolo and her brother, who knew Mr Burgess as “Cap”, started “freaking out”.

“The first thing my brother said was, ‘That's not right. That can't be right!’ because my mom, who we called ‘Sweetie Pie’, hated Cap because he was always cheating on [his wife].

“So I looked at the e-mails and then my brother was like, ‘You should reach out to them.’”

Ms Okolo sent messages apologising for her delayed response, adding that she “would love to have a conversation”.

A phone call ensued, at which point she learnt she was “the 21st child [to have] shown up”.

“We have a lot of siblings out there,” she said.

The discovery encouraged her brother to take the DNA test.

“It did come back that he is my half-sibling. So he is not Cap’s. My sister, she's going to do it. My other brother refuses, which I get. He's like, ‘It doesn't matter.’”

Most heartbreaking is that her mother died having kept the secret for 30 years.

“She died when she was 60, I was 30. [But my brother] was like, ‘You know, Sweetie Pie was everything. It doesn't change anything.’”

The man that Ms Okolo thought was her father left the family when she was five years old and returned nine years later.

“So there was always a male void there,” she said. “I grew up with Cap.”

In a phone call with her newly discovered cousin, Ms Okolo gained a better understanding of Mr Burgess’s life before he left Bermuda.

“She proceeds to tell me about six children – they call them ‘the legal children’ because he was married – and that he left them along with all the other children in Bermuda that he didn’t raise and he went to, I think Canada first and then the States. She's telling me all this and I'm just bawling.”

The cousin then connected her with other family members living in the US.

They bonded immediately and agreed to meet in Florida where Ms Riddick and another child, Marshalle Smith, live.

“We were the secret, the outside kids,” said Ms Smith, who travelled to Bermuda with Ms Okolo. “You know you're related but it's unspoken because he had a wife with six kids. And the whole time his wife was having children he was having [multiple children].

“Almost every woman that he had a relationship with, they were not one-hit wonders; they were relationships. It's the unspoken secret.”

Ms Okolo “was a little shocked” that people could be related without having a relationship with each other.

“I [had to explain it was] because we were the secret,” Ms Smith said. “But now we're all in our sixties, [one of his sons] is 75 – it’s because of her coming into our lives that the secrets have died. All the parents have gone through transition. So it's up to our kids to say yes, I'm willing to open my heart.”

The women are part of a group of ten people that came here hoping to connect with other members of Mr Burgess’s family.

“We're going to meet whomever wants to meet.

“It's way too long for the people who have known about each other and grew up close to each other to not talk,” Ms Okolo said.

“I know history is powerful. You don't know what people went through in their childhood being ‘outside’; you don't know what the ‘legals’ went through.”

In some instances, the children were at the same school. Ms Smith won the Miss Teen Bermuda pageant, her presence was unacknowledged by a sister who also entered.

“They had to pass my mother's front door to get to their house. We literally were one house away from each other,” Ms Smith said.

“Her dad, because at that point he was living in New Jersey, he flew to Bermuda to support her, his wife's legals. I overheard his wife, who was an American, say to him, I cannot believe you're not going to go and congratulate your daughter.’ And that was the first time – at almost 17 years old – that it was confirmed that he recognised or acknowledged me as his child. So he congratulated me and then went off back to the United States.”

Ms Smith is grateful she had other males to step into the role of father for her.

“I have a brother who's substantially older than me – I'm the baby of six – and I had an uncle who lived with us who never married. So I had that male figure,” she said. “As a child, all you want is stuff – I had a bicycle, I flew to New York to shop, I had a wonderful life so I never really missed having a father.”

As an adult, however, she sometimes sees men with their daughters and realises what could have been.

“I never had that. But most of my life … you don't miss what you don't have. I think it's harder for kids when a dad leaves because when you’ve never had it, you have no measurement.”

The women shared their story with The Royal Gazette in the hope that “it might inspire other people” to accept one another despite “whatever happened in the past”.

“The fact is that we're all here and God doesn't make mistakes,” Ms Smith said. “We’ll never have the answers because [the parents are] all gone. This is opening Pandora's box in a very positive way. This is not the norm. People die with these secrets of outside kids.

“When sharing our journey with others, people's reactions are so awesome and it puts a smile on their faces. The world still has people in it that are open to love.”