After her cousin Madeline Raddatz's funeral in New London at the beginning of February, Tara Taglianetti-Chambers sat at a table with other cousins, listening to a story about the secret wife of a late uncle.

She joked: "Oh, we always thought we'd get a knock at the door that my father had another family somewhere else, because he traveled a lot."

And then her cousin Mary Ann Reisinger mentioned, "Well, you do have that other sister," Taglianetti-Chambers recalled.

Her heart stopped. She yelled across the room for her sister, Erin Barker, to come over — and to sit down.

Taglianetti-Chambers, of Hopedale, Mass., and Barker, of Georgetown, Mass., didn't know they had a half-sister. Reisinger didn't know that they didn't know.

At 55 and 52, respectively, the sisters are among the youngest of about 20 cousins on the side of their late father, Felix Taglianetti. They say the cousins pretty much all knew about their half-sister, and assumed the sisters knew.

Barker said "religion wasn't a big deal" in her nuclear family, but there was still a sense in large, Italian Catholic families that an out-of-wedlock birth was not the kind of thing that should be happening.

Since February, Taglianetti-Chambers, Barker and some of their relatives have become determined to find the long-lost sister, who they believe to be about 75 and named Carolyn.

Taglianetti-Chambers and Barker have a brother, Peter Taglianetti. They said he was not at the funeral and has been hands-off in the search for their half-sister. He did not wish to talk to The Day for this story.

"If she knows about us and doesn't want anything to do with us, we just want to somehow convey to her: We just didn't know," Barker said. "We didn't know and we're sorry."

Barker has placed an ad in The Day, with two childhood pictures of a girl identified as "Carol, Caroline, or Carolyn," the notation that she lived in or around New London in the 1940s and '50s, and the name of their shared parent, Felix Taglianetti.

She has looked through street listings. She checked the Connecticut State Library to make sure her father wasn't married to his daughter's mother, whose name no living person in the family seems to know.

Barker, a lawyer, has been going through archives of The Day in search of a photo from a fire that allegedly identifies her father as Carolyn's father. But without knowing the exact year — let alone the date — this has proved difficult.

Her cousin, Jack Taglianetti, went to the New London Fire Department and looked through old files but was not able to find anything. He was told the department doesn't have records prior to 1950 and believes the fire was in the 1940s.

Barker has contacted private investigators and an investigative genealogist, and she said neither would take her case without a date of birth. Taglianetti-Chambers reached out to the TLC show "Long Last Family," and she has sought more information on Facebook.

Within a few days after the funeral, Taglianetti-Chambers wrote a Facebook post seeking information on a woman named "Caroline, or something like that" but did not identify her in the post as her half-sister. It garnered 31 shares.

Newspaper clip reveals secret daughter

Felix Taglianetti was born in 1909 in Terryville, Conn., the oldest son of nine children of two Italian immigrants, according to census records. He grew up in New London and lived on Mountain Avenue in the 1930s, '40s and '50s.

His daughters say that prior to their births, family members found out about the existence of Carolyn through a newspaper article about a fire where Carolyn and her mother lived. Barker said she doesn't know where the fire occurred, which has proved a "stumbling block." But family members say that after the fire, Carolyn and her mother moved to the corner of Prest and Blackhall streets.

Apparently Taglianetti pulled them out of the house from the fire, Barker said, and the article identified him as Carolyn's father. Jack Taglianetti, 68, tells this story the same way.

And once family members knew, Carolyn became a part of their lives.

At age 80, Mickey Sleights is among the oldest of Felix Taglianetti's nieces and nephews, and therefore one of the few family members alive with memories of Carolyn.

"She lived not too far, maybe 300 or 400 yards from where I lived, and occasionally she would come to my grandmother's house, because at this point in time, we had a number of our meals at my grandmother's house," Sleights said.

He occasionally walked her home, and he recalls his uncle buying Carolyn's mother a TV. Sleights would sometimes go over there to watch Sunday football.

One of the photos in the "trying to locate our sister" newspaper ad crops out Mary Ann Reisinger, who is Sleights' sister, and the other crops out both Sleights and Reisinger. It was through determining that Reisinger, 69, was about 4 in one of the photos that family estimated Carolyn would be around 75 today.

Sleights believes that his late mother took the photos, and that they came from an album she made for Reisinger. Barker thinks that in one of the photos, Carolyn "has the Taglianetti look: the longer face, kind of deep-set eyes."

The problem with secrets

Taglianetti was traveling throughout New England for his construction job, and he met his wife, Margaret, working in Framingham, Mass. They married in 1960, when Felix was in his early 50s.

Barker has heard that her mother knew of her father's daughter.

The couple raised their three kids in Framingham but also maintained a house on Elm Street in New London, where the family would spend school vacations. Felix died in 1982, and Margaret in the mid-'90s.

Barker noted she was only 16 when her father died, an age when one is not interested in sitting down and talking to one's parents about their pasts.

At age 56, Dave Taglianetti is one of the younger cousins, so his knowledge of Carolyn is vague, but he recalls his mother mentioning her a few times. He said his mother died in September, after suffering from dementia.

He feels the 1950 census records would be helpful, but per the "72-Year Rule," they will not be publicly released until April 2022. Still, he doesn't think Carolyn even went by the last name of Taglianetti.

Barker said she was "gobsmacked" when she heard about Carolyn at the funeral. After her initial shock, she felt sadness at the idea that maybe her father wanted to see Carolyn when he was ill and dying. And then she felt anger this was kept a secret for so long.

"I think that's the problem with secrets: You just keep a secret for so long, there's never a right time to reveal the secret, and it just keeps perpetuating," she said.

She doesn't know why it had to be kept a secret. She doesn't know if the secrecy was her mother's will. She doesn't know whether her father kept up contact with Carolyn after the move to Framingham.

"I feel horrible to think that she thinks we knew and never bothered to find her, you know?" Taglianetti-Chambers said. "I don't know what to think. That's why we're desperate to find her."

e.moser@theday.com