Episode 11 Family Finders

Families can be driven apart for all manner of reasons.

My mum went away and didn't come back.

And when you do lose touch with your loved ones...

-I never saw Kathleen again.

-..finding them can take a lifetime.

I wonder where he is, I wonder what he's doing.

You don't really know where to begin.

Especially when they could be anywhere, at home or abroad.

And that's where the family finders come in.

Hi, it's the Salvation Army Family Tracing Service.

From international organisations...

There's never been a day when we've never had new enquiries.

..to genealogy detective agencies...

When is it you last had contact with him?

..and dedicated one-man bands.

I like to do the searches that other people can't get

because it makes me feel good.

They hunt through history to bring families back together again.

You are my biological dad.

In this series, we follow the work of the family finders.

This case came from our Australian colleagues.

Learning the tricks they use to track the missing relatives through time.

I'm 68 years of age, she's 75 years of age

and we're just starting off.

And meeting the people whose lives they change along the way.

-I said, "Well, this is your younger sister."

-It's a miracle.

I was struck speechless and I couldn't stop crying.

It's a proud moment for Dad.

That was the start of finding my family.

Scattered amongst the UK population of just over 64 million people

are many long-lost loved ones.

And for those family members desperate to find them,

it can feel like an impossible task.

But around the country are bands of dedicated searchers who make

it their quest to help reunite families,

even when the odds are stacked against them.

And for some of these family finders, the harder the case

and the greater the challenge, the better.

I thought this search was the most difficult search I'd ever done.

So, professionally, from my point of view,

we were in heaven with it, really. It was fantastic.

Fraser Kinnie runs a family finding agency in Hartlepool.

And the thrill of the chase is what gets him out of bed in the morning.

Christina had been looking for her sisters for many, many years

but I did feel that if anybody could do it, I felt I could do it.

Christina Boston lives in Stockton-on-Tees in County Durham.

She was born in Middlesbrough in 1971.

Christina spent the first 18 months of her life with her

birth mother, but was then taken into care

until she was adopted by new parents, Pam and Brian.

Really good happy times with the family.

Absolutely brilliant parents. They fostered other children,

so I had a big family to grow up with as well.

When she was nine,

Christina got wind of a letter which her birth mother had left for her.

And I can remember asking my mum for this letter

and wanted to know what was in it.

And when I asked she said, "No problem, I'll give you it."

She gave me it straight away and it was something like,

"I love you, I didn't want to give you up," something like that.

But it was just very short, very sweet

and it just came from the heart.

But it wasn't until she was 19 that her first husband

took it upon himself to look for her birth mum.

It actually had her address on the corner,

where she lived years ago, and he just happened to go up to that house

and asked the neighbour where she was living.

So he took me there to this neighbour's house

and she looked at me and she went,

"You're Brenda's daughter, aren't you?"

The neighbour didn't just know where Christina's mum was living,

she knew where she was at that very moment.

And she took me to her.

She was actually in bingo in Stockton High Street.

And I can remember to this day, on the intercom they said,

"Can a Brenda Lillystone

"go to the reception, your daughter's waiting."

We just looked and stared at each other for a minute or two

and then just sort of hugged each other and that was it.

I just couldn't believe that all them years

that I'd been living in Stockton, she lived round the corner.

I said I'd probably passed her hundreds of times on the street.

Christina and Brenda wasted no time in getting to know each other.

And it wasn't long before Christina made another discovery that

would shape the rest of her life.

It turned out she had two sisters.

Brenda told me that there were twin girls called

Rosetta and Priscilla.

But Brenda revealed she'd also had to give up Rosetta and Priscilla

as a result of mental health problems.

She didn't want to give us up, but because of the situation,

she obviously couldn't cope with us at the time,

but she gave us the best option she could give us by giving us up.

Rosetta and Priscilla were the last children Brenda was allowed

to have before the state intervened.

Because of her health, they made her get sterilised.

It was sad, she couldn't remember a lot and obviously

because the other girls were taken away at a young age, that was

something that, it destroyed her at the end.

Christina resolved to track down her twin sisters -

as much for Brenda's sake as for her own.

Every time I went round to Brenda's she always

talked about my sisters, that she didn't want to give us up

and she always hoped that she would see them all one day.

That was her dream, a bit like mine,

that's all I ever wanted was to find my sisters.

Christina did all she could to find the twins and fulfil her mum's dream.

But the relationship with her birth mother ended as suddenly as it began.

She passed away.

47 years old.

Her life was gone like that.

I'm glad that I did get to meet her, very glad

to meet my birth mother because it's something you can never get back.

I didn't get a childhood with her but I did get to see her

before she passed away, and it means a lot to me.

After Brenda's death from a heart condition,

Christina tried to carry on with her life.

But as the years passed, her desire to find her sisters remained.

And when she was in her 30s,

she decided to ask her adoptive mum Pam for help.

I've always felt that when we adopted you that when you wanted

to find your family...

I felt you had the right to know them if you wanted to.

Pam took it upon herself to solve the case,

researching adoption records, trawling websites

and doing everything she could think of to try

and find the elusive Rosetta and Priscilla.

I literally went on adoption sites

and left quite a few messages all over the place.

For years, Pam and Christina hoped to hear from the girls

or for a lead of any kind,

but every avenue led to another dead end.

-They were just not there.

-Yeah.

-We couldn't find them.

The case became famous amongst amateur family finders,

but despite their best efforts,

Rosetta and Priscilla were no closer to being found.

Until Fraser Kinnie decided to get involved.

I'd known about this search for the twins for a long time.

Probably four, five years, I'd seen their posts on social media

and search websites and it always kind of interested me.

The problem was, just like all the amateur enthusiasts,

he couldn't find Rosetta and Priscilla.

Most people who looked at this search were struggling

because they were looking for the names Rosetta and Priscilla.

And that's when Fraser had an idea.

What if the names were the problem all along?

He decided to test his theory.

The difficulty in this search was that we didn't know

what their new names were.

We had to refer back to the adoption register for 1972.

There was only one thing for it.

Fraser began the laborious task of trawling through

an entire year's worth of adoption records.

What we're really looking for are two people with the same surname

whose adoption numbers are in sequence.

And then what we basically had to do was go through all of these,

working out who all the twins were.

I was then checking up on our system

to see what their dates of birth were,

to see if it was the 20th July, 1972,

which we knew was the twins' date of birth.

We found this page here and their date of births corresponded,

so we knew there was a good chance these were the girls.

Fraser had found two possible names.

But would they be Christina's twin sisters?

And if they were, how would they react to being found?

As well as professionals like Fraser,

the UK is home to thousands of amateur genealogists,

who like nothing better

than helping put other people back in touch with their lost family.

One such enthusiast is Wendy Thompson, who by her own admission,

is addicted to the thrill of uncovering family mysteries.

It just became an absolute obsession, it really did.

But little did Wendy realise when digging into one particular case,

that she would make an unexpected discovery about her own family.

Adrian Searle is 61

and lives in Wootton Bridge on the Isle of Wight.

I was born in London and then, in the very late '50s, early '60s,

we all moved out to a place called Billericay in Essex.

The family enjoyed a comfortable new life in the Essex countryside,

but when Adrian was still just a boy, tragedy struck.

And life would never be the same again.

I was about ten or 11,

and we were taking a day trip over to France,

and we'd just got off the ferry and my mother was taken ill.

And we drove to Calais Hospital.

And I remember it now. That was four o'clock and at twenty-past four,

my dad came out, his hair was standing on end,

he was white as a sheet, and he just said, "She's dead, son."

She'd died within 20 minutes.

And that was just horrendous.

We were absolutely devastated. You know, obviously. She was only 48.

Despite his father's best efforts, the grief that followed

his mother's death had a grave impact on all their relationships.

It kind of destroyed the family.

We never really got on and we just drifted apart.

His father later remarried but relations

between him and his son only worsened.

And when Adrian was a teenager, things came to a head.

He said, "You've got a choice". He said, "You can either work

"and help your stepmother around the house, or you can get out."

Well, that's like red rag to a bull to me.

So I just packed my suitcase and that was it, I went.

Still only 15, Adrian left home.

I went in the catering trade,

travelled around most of the country.

My father and I never spoke for 15 years.

Decades later, Adrian and his father resolved their differences.

But his dad died in 1998.

His dad's death highlighted how little Adrian knew about his life.

He yearned to feel closer to him in the only way now possible -

through researching his past.

All through the time I knew my dad,

he never once mentioned his father and I thought, he must have had one.

I just presumed that his father had died during the First World War

and he didn't really know his dad.

Adrian had only the bare minimum to get him started.

All I had to go on was my father's full name,

and my grandmother's Christian name.

After some detective work, he found a record of his grandad,

but this discovery was bittersweet.

He died in 1971.

And by 1971, I was 19.

He was still alive when I was a teenager. That was a total shock.

Total shock.

I felt cheated that I never got to even know my grandfather.

This upsetting revelation begged the question,

why had his father hidden Grandfather Searle from him?

But little did Adrian know his quest to find out more

was about to throw up an even more remarkable discovery.

Christina Boston and her adoptive mum, Pam,

had spent ten fruitless years searching for Christina's

younger twin sisters, Priscilla and Rosetta.

Professional family finder Fraser Kinnie

tracked down a potential match,

but far from being Priscilla and Rosetta,

these twins had the rather less exotic names of Rachel and Sarah.

When we got to this page and we saw Sarah and Rachel's name

and we knew their dates of birth were the dates we were looking for,

all of a sudden, we'd gone from 40,000 names, down to two.

So what we then had to do

was find out who they were and where they are today.

With the hard part done, Fraser made quick work of locating the twins.

And 300 miles away in Southampton,

Sarah and Rachel were about to get the shock of their lives.

-Give us a squeeze, then!

-Oh!

-Get off me, you're wet.

About six months ago, we had a very strange phone call from

a man called Fraser.

And he says, "Do you know that your sister

"has been searching for you for ten years or something like this?"

And I'm like, "My God." Straight away, it was very strange.

I got very emotional, very quickly, right, and I'm...

I started crying, sitting on the bed and I'm like...

-SHE MAKES STUTTERING SOUND

-Like a gibbering wreck!

My partner then thinks, "Oh, I'm going to have to phone Rachel now,

"straight away, and tell her."

-I was on the bus.

-Oh, and it was...

Oh, it was absolutely mad. Completely mad.

-It was mad.

-SHE LAUGHS

Rachel and Sarah Garbutt were born within minutes of each other.

We were fostered pretty much from when our mother gave birth,

and then after the age of about one,

we got officially adopted by our parents now.

Obviously, we were lucky, I think, that we were kept together,

because it could have been very different.

-And, yeah, our childhood was quite a happy one, wasn't it?

-It was.

-It was very, very good, yeah, we...

-We moved about a lot.

Always, you know, doing clubs and you know, always together.

As children, they took the news

that they were adopted in their stride.

Where we was younger, we was about seven, or thereabouts,

she told us that we was adopted, explained in a way, you know, like,

"Well, you were chosen, you were special, we chose you", you know.

And said our natural mother had been ill,

this is why we was looked after by them.

It wasn't until they were older and Sarah had children of her own

that the twins felt ready to find their birth mother,

and ordered up the adoption papers.

Rachel was born first, she was born Priscilla Lillystone.

I was born second, and I was called Rosetta Lillystone.

And it was really strange finding out

you were born another different name.

Eager to find their birth mother,

Rachel turned to a colleague at work for help.

There was a lady that used to do family tree sort of work.

So I gave her what I knew, which was her name and her date of birth.

And that was it. So I kept seeing her

and she kept looking at me and never said anything,

and I kept leaving it and leaving it,

and then I thought, I'm going to ask her.

So I approached and said, "Have you found out anything?"

And she sort of looked at me a bit sheepish,

and I thought, mmm. I said, "She's dead, isn't she?"

And she said, "Yeah, she died, like, ten years ago."

So that was all a bit of a shock, because I thought, well,

she was only young.

We never got to meet our natural mum.

When we tried to do the trace, she'd already passed.

So, unfortunately, for us, it was left too late.

The twins had sadly missed out on the chance of

ever getting to know their birth mother.

But now they'd been put in touch

with a sister they never knew they had.

Fraser rung me out of the blue. A very excitable man, he was.

Garbled all a load of stuff, and all I heard was, "I've found your twin sisters."

And after that, I didn't care what else he said.

I was that shocked, because it was out of the blue.

We were excited because we had pulled off

something that we felt was a really, really hard search.

The three sisters had found each other after a lifetime apart.

Making contact for the first time

could have been a nerve-racking experience,

but it turned out to be anything but.

When I spoke to my sister, Sarah, for the first time,

it was like we'd known each other for years.

She said, "Yeah, I'm sat here, tears coming down my face and sort of...

-SHE MAKES STUTTERING SOUND

-"..a bit jittery."

But, oh, it was brilliant.

Christina's met her younger sisters on a handful of occasions,

but there's someone extremely important the twins are yet to meet.

Today, Christina's introducing Rachel and Sarah

to her adoptive mum, Pam, for the very first time.

I think I'm feeling more nervous now than I was when I first met them.

-I don't know...

-It's cos we're getting close,

we're going to meet them any minute.

Christina and Pam have travelled 300 miles from their home

in Stockton-on-Tees to the south coast.

And Pam's excited at what the day has in store.

It's almost like... I'm extending my family.

They're your sisters, but because you're my daughter...

-It's like just accepting them as part of our family.

-Yeah.

But first, Pam leaves her adopted daughter Christina to meet

her younger sisters on her own.

-I'll see you later.

-Right, bye, Mam.

The twins can't wait to get back together with the older sister

they never knew they had.

Hi!

Oh, how you doing?

-All right?

-How you doing?

-Brilliant.

-Hey, you.

-Brilliant.

LAUGHTER

-I'm crying already.

-I know.

Oh...

The sisters have already marked their new relationships

with sister rings.

-You've got your ring on. I've got mine on.

-Yes.

'When I got the sister ring off them, it made me feel like a sister.'

It means so much to me, because it's all I ever wanted to do.

As the twins never got to meet their birth mother,

Christina's brought some treasured photos along

to show Rachel and Sarah what she looked like.

-That's... That's Brenda, and that's...

-Oh, my goodness.

..her husband Bob. That's their wedding day.

Wow.

Although Rachel and Sarah never got the chance to meet their mother,

Christina's photos provide some sense of connection.

I think you look like her.

-Yeah, probably there is.

-There's a bit, isn't there?

-You think?

-There is a resemblance.

-I do, yeah, I do.

Think there's a little bit there.

It was her dream to meet us all. It just wasn't meant to be.

-Oh, bless her.

-Quite sad, really.

-It is.

-Mmm.

-Yeah.

But there's another very important person in Christina's life that she

can't wait to introduce to her new-found sisters -

her adoptive mum Pam,

without whose help, they would never have been reunited.

LAUGHTER

-Hello.

-Hiya, darling. How are you?

-Thanks for coming.

-Oh, God.

Thanks for coming, Pam.

-Oh.

-It's really lovely to see you.

-Oh, it's great.

You're a star.

I feel like a star.

It's the end of the search, isn't it?

It's...

It's just...

Well, what they call closure, I suppose, isn't it?

It is, it is.

And I was imagining you to be about six!

It's just been the most wonderful experience, I think,

-so far of my whole entire life.

-It's been like a whirlwind.

-Like a whirlwind.

-It has, cos it's all happened so quickly.

Cos that was Brenda's dream, to see all her daughters together,

and unfortunately it didn't happen,

but she's up there looking down, and I hope that she's happy up there,

now that we've all met up and we're all together.

Following his father's death,

Adrian was shocked to discover that he'd had a grandfather

who he'd never met.

Once I found my grandfather, I could find where he was born,

but I couldn't find anything previous.

So he was a dead end, I couldn't go any further.

I just thought, "Well, you know,

"I'm going to need a little help here."

Desperate to get to the bottom of this family mystery,

he made a plea on an online forum.

I put a notice on the... on the message board,

and up popped this person called Wendy Thompson.

Adrian's post was picked up by genealogy fanatic Wendy Thompson,

who was online updating her own ever-growing family tree,

and keeping an eye out for other people she could help.

My tree is huge. We've got thousands of people on it.

Wendy lives on the Sussex coast with her husband Colin.

I was born in Birmingham,

but we moved down to Brighton when I was 12.

Like Adrian, her grandfather's life was shrouded in secrecy.

My father rarely spoke about him,

and yet, he was still alive when I was alive,

and I never knew about any of my father's family

apart from his mother.

And again, just like Adrian, it was the death of Wendy's parents

which ignited her preoccupation with the past.

I got into genealogy when my parents died, 11 years ago.

It just became such an obsession.

Now, Wendy's obsession appeared to be taking her in an unexpected

direction, because it wasn't just Adrian's life story that

struck a chord, it was his surname.

I thought, "Oh, I recognise that name,"

and it was also a Searle, so that sort of got my interest.

Searle was also Wendy's maiden name,

and she began to suspect that she may have stumbled across

a member of her own family,

but to be sure, she needed more information.

At the end of her e-mail, she said, "Who was your dad?"

And obviously, I wrote back, and said Eric Albert William.

So I found that, yes,

it was the same person, same dates and everything,

so I got back to him and said, "I think you and I are related."

It turned out that Grandfather and her grandfather were brothers.

And it was just really exciting.

I'd said, "I think you're my second cousin."

It was just a fantastic feeling.

Adrian's wasted no time getting to know Wendy.

Today, he's making the journey to the mainland from his home

on the Isle of Wight to see her for only the third time.

I look upon her as a sister,

and making the journey to see my...

my sister again, very emotional.

Very emotional.

I never had a brother, and always wanted one.

And then, yes, he is my...

-He is my adopted brother.

-Brilliant.

The two cousins have arranged to meet on the clifftops

near Wendy's Brighton home.

-Waiting for somebody special?

-Hello.

Today, Wendy and Adrian are on a mission.

How are you doing?

They've each been doing some more research,

keen to get to the bottom of why there was such secrecy

surrounding both their grandfathers' lives.

Wendy's grandad's name was Victor,

while Adrian's grandfather was Albert, or Harry to his friends.

-Now, that's Harry.

-Ah.

He's quite like...quite like Victor.

Same shaped faces, and everything.

-Chunky.

-He has, he's got the same cheekbones.

-They were brothers, were they?

-Yeah.

-So...

We shouldn't be surprised that they look alike.

-Yes, the resemblance is there.

-Yes.

Wendy's been researching Albert's past,

and has uncovered an extremely colourful life story.

Goodness, you have been busy.

And I've got here that your grandfather was a violinist,

played in an orchestra...

Albert was part of an orchestra who provided the soundtrack to the

silent movies of the era, but it was a career with a short shelf life.

The talkies came in in the late '20s.

Yes, so he'd have been put out of work.

-Probably been redundant.

-Yes.

Wendy thinks this fall from grace could explain why

he was never spoken about.

If he did have bad luck in his life,

maybe he was ostracised from his family.

But what of Wendy's grandfather, Albert's brother Victor?

Wendy may have got to the bottom of why he, too,

was shrouded in mystery.

Victor was injured in the war.

He lost an arm.

Victor was suffering from shellshock,

a common condition for serving soldiers at that time.

He ended up mentally ill because of the war.

He was in a hut, and they were captured and shot,

and he never really recovered.

It was an era in which mental health was poorly understood,

and any issues could sometimes be swept under the carpet

by embarrassed families.

-That was a terrible time.

-Dreadful, dreadful.

Whatever the reason, the most important thing is that right here,

right now, two lost cousins have found each other

and are revelling in their new-found friendship.

Fabulous experience, absolutely fabulous.

Been lovely catching up with Wendy. Marvellous.

I really do think that it would have been nicer to have known him

a lot longer, so that I could have had a brother a lot longer.

He's just one of the family, now, so, you know, he'll always be here.