Jay Brooks finds long-lost grandfather, Katoomba Aboriginal football star Jackie Brooks through Google search

Jay Brooks, from Whalan in western Sydney, was determined to help his mother learn more about their family. Armed with a surname, suburb and birth certificate, the 34-year-old went online to unlock the past late last year.
After typing the words “Brooks, Katoomba, Eileen” in Google, clicking the enter key took just seconds to unlock decades of secrets.
A story by a Blue Mountains historian was in the top three searches, and it gave Mr Brooks and his mum all the answers they had been desperately searching for.
The book, Black and blue: The story of Walter ‘Jackie’ Brooks, Blue Mountains Rugby League Hero of the 1920s and 1930s, was written by Blue Mountains historian John Low.
The book focused on Aboriginal man Jackie and how rugby league helped him become well regarded by the community during one of Australia’s darkest chapters.
“Reading that article, it was the greatest moment of my life to be honest,” Mr Brooks said.
“Thank goodness to Mr Low, finally we had answers.”
From the article Mr Brooks found his mum Eileen Brooks was the youngest of five children fathered by Jackie Brooks with a European woman, Eileen Rutland.
The children, considered half-castes, were taken by the Australian Government and separately placed into foster care — victims of the Stolen Generation.
Eileen was rehomed as a baby soon after bulldozers moved in to destroy the Aboriginal settlement where they lived, known as The Gully community in Katoomba, to make way for a motor racing circuit.
“Some people went to work, came home and everything was gone,” Ms Brooks said.
“It makes me sick, my father must have thought he had lost me forever and left the area with a broken heart.”
Ms Brooks, who grew up in St Marys and still lives there, said until her son’s online investigation, she grew up being told she was of south sea island descent.
“I didn’t even know I was ­Aboriginal, no one would tell me anything so I believed the worst — I believed my father must have been a deadbeat but he wasn’t,” she said.
“He was the most popular figure in Katoomba, he had the shiniest shoes, he opened doors for ladies, he worked hard and was a great man.”
Sadly Jackie Brooks died at Redfern in 1968, when Ms Brooks would have been 11.
Ms Brooks remembers meeting a woman at St Marys train station when she was just a girl.
“I was told later that woman was my mother,” she said.
Since discovering the first article, Ms Brooks and her son have reconnected with cousins and even met with the article’s author, Mr Low. They have also come to know that Ms Brooks’ grandfather, known as King Billy, was the first to arrive in The Gully in the early 1900s.