And I had two sisters and a mother with me on the weekend at Grenfell, all four of us yapping away as we made the walk from an excellent Chinese restaurant to our hotel, so the fear of tripping over someone was real.

The fear of being hit by a car was virtually non-existent, given that the only car turned off at a roundabout even before it reached the main street so we were able to keep wandering in the dark with no problems.

At 5.30 the following morning it was even quieter in human terms, although the birds were up. I have no idea if Grenfell is over-indulged with roosters but it certainly seemed so. At the first hint of dawn they were on their way, crowing and out-crowing each other. Locals no doubt slept right through it. I, clearly, was not a local.

I like walking the streets of places I’ve never been to in the very early morning before people are up. And for some reason I’ve never been to Grenfell, despite it being only five hours from where I live – past Katoomba, Lithgow and Bathurst, and just a quick final run once you hit Cowra.

Grenfell is like a lot of Australian country towns established in the 1800s. Its old buildings are looking their age, with some commendable restorations and renovations, but they’ve aged with character. They reflect the economics of the period in which they were built, when labour was cheap and workers could afford to be creative. Brickwork in country town buildings of a certain time is often ornate. I’m a brickie’s daughter. I appreciate a fancy bond or stylish sills. I know the work that goes into a fine arch.

I liked Grenfell even more on Sunday morning when I found a woman making a decent coffee in a service station at 6am. I wandered back across the main street – not a car or human soul in sight – to sit on a timber bench with my back to the sun reading Saturday’s papers, with a couple of broody pigeons as my only companions.

Grenfell boasts writer Henry Lawson, cricketer Stan McCabe, tennis player Jan Lehane and bushranger Ben Hall as its most famous residents, and gold as its reason for being. It was named after gold commissioner John Grenfell who was shot in the groin by bushrangers in 1866 and died 24 hours later. I can think of more pleasant ways to die.

We were in Grenfell to meet relatives for the first time and solve some mysteries.

I’ve just read a document showing there were 1107 adoptions registered in NSW in 1938, the year my mother was born. The figure was roughly the same in 1942, the year she was adopted by her great-aunt Ada.

My mother was still a child when she discovered she was adopted. Ada didn’t confirm it until a conversation the day before my mother married my father. If that sounds brutal, it was. But Ada, long dead, wasn’t over-endowed in the loving mother department.

Somewhere along the way, and the exact point is unclear, my mother found out her biological mother, Edna, was still alive. After Ada died my mother made contact.

Edna was 18 when she had my mother. She refused to reveal the father’s name or any details about the circumstances of how she became pregnant, leading to some wild and fanciful theories by me and my 10 siblings. Edna went to her grave with that secret, despite knowing it caused my mother real pain.

I wrote an article in 2008 after interviewing my mother following release of a report on adoption. It found adoption itself was not necessarily an issue, but secrecy was.

As my mother said: “The lying is the worst. You know it’s a lie when you ask if you’re adopted and you’re told no, and you’re not to talk about it. But you know, and because you know you’re thinking, ‘So how many more lies are there?’.”

“So you find it hard to trust people, and that has an impact on how you view the world and live your life,” she said.

My sister Julie made it her mission to find my mother’s biological father after she heard of Ancestry.com, where a DNA sample, a lot of legwork, phone calls, an existing family tree or two and a bit of luck can help you track down your relatives.

A week ago I wrote of a man who used Ancestry.com to discover his biological father was a Catholic priest a decade after making contact with his mother, a Catholic nun.

Julie’s work found our mother’s biological father James, who was 17-years-old when the 18-year-old Edna told him she was pregnant with his baby. He was the only child of a Grenfell couple who were part of a very well known pastoral family. And as we found out on the weekend from a relative in her 90s, James’ mother was “a bit of a toff”.

Quite the family scandal, in other words. James’ parents sold up their large property in late 1937 – in the months after Edna became pregnant – and moved to Young where our mother’s birth was registered. Records show Edna and our mother lived in Young until the adoption. Mum moved to Sydney to live with Ada and her husband Bill, which is also where she became a Catholic, apparently a condition imposed by the devout Ada and Bill. James went to war, came back, married in Sydney and died without having another child.

At the excellent Grenfell local history museum two photos of my mother’s paternal grandparents were found, but so far no photos of her father. The relatives we spoke to talked about some kind of falling-out and the destruction of photos, but who knows?

We don’t know why Edna finally gave Mum up for adoption, or what happened while they were in Young. But what we do know is how profoundly those secrets and lies of so long ago affected our lives so many years later, and how necessary the need to discover the truth.