PAULA DUNCAN'S TRAGIC UNTOLD STORY

Her ancestors might have suffered but the actress is making them proud

- Wade Sellers

When approached to appear on SBS' Who Do You Think You Are?, one question immediately came to mind for Paula Duncan.

"Why me?" the veteran entertainer, whose career spans more than four decades, tells Woman's Day, revealing she was losing her sense of self before taking the plunge on to the emotional series.

"But then I thought, there's a history there with me and my sister Carmen. I've been around for a while," she laughs.

Having lost both her parents, Robert and Mary, her brother Bob and actress sister Carmen over the years, Paula, 69, says she knew she was in for an emotional rollercoaster.

"There's only two of us left now, myself and Warren," she says. "For me it was very haunting, because I felt like I was losing my identity, with mum and dad and the others gone, you kind of say, 'Well, who am I? I found the whole thing so emotional - I couldn't stop crying.

"But it gave me such comfort to know something about my past. It was like a warm rug on a cold day," she adds.

LAWBREAKER

Throughout her episode, Paula travels from Orange to the NSW Central Tablelands, and all the way to the English Channel Island of Guernsey where she discovers a bloodline filled with tenacity, talent, and the occasional unruliness.

But learning about her great-grandparents gave Paula the chance to discover where some of her most endearing traits come from.

"I've been a bit of knockabout, and I guess you could say that I got that from John," she says of her two-times-great-grandfather John Hilton, whose multiple run-ins with the law found him only just escaping the death penalty.