Episode 2 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...

And there's never been a day when we haven't 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 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 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.

I was finding a family!

Every year, thousands of people throughout the UK attempt to

trace long-lost relatives.

This daunting quest is one the Salvation Army has provided

help with for over 130 years through its Family Tracing Service.

Good afternoon. Family Tracing. How can I help?

On average, we accept around about 2,000 enquiries a year from family

members, and obviously with every enquiry we take on,

we want a positive result.

Recently, the Family Tracing unit received an intriguing enquiry from a

woman in Huddersfield who hadn't seen her little brother for over 30 years.

We received an application from Mary,

who explained that she was looking for her younger half-brother,

Leonard, and she believed that he was still living in London,

where she last had contact with him.

Mary Kitchen lives in Huddersfield with her husband

and four children, but her story begins in 1960.

I was born in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire.

At the age of three months, myself and my mum moved to London.

Her mother met Jamaican-born Sydney Banton

and fell pregnant with Mary's baby brother, Lennie.

I don't remember Mum being pregnant, but obviously when she had him,

I was taken to the hospital

to see him, and so obviously I knew about him.

After growing up with just her mother, Mary now had a brother.

But it turned out Sydney was married,

and it wasn't long before his family

came over from Jamaica to join him.

At first, Mary and baby Lennie

lived together with their own mother,

but just a few months after his birth,

she fell ill and both children moved in with Sydney and his family.

I remember staying in the house with him

and all his other brothers, and he's got one sister,

being part of the family,

and then obviously Mum must have moved on then, and so we lost touch.

So, basically, I've been brought up as an only child, really.

Ultimately, Lennie's birth father, Sydney, wanted to bring him up,

so Mary and her mother moved back to West Yorkshire.

All she had left to remind her of her brother was one precious photo.

I had a photograph of myself and him that I've carried with me

wherever we've moved to.

He's never been out of my thoughts. I've always thought about him.

Aged 19, Mary tried to reconnect with the then-teenage Lennie,

but he didn't want to know.

Now, 30 years later, she wants to give it another try.

I discussed it with my family. My husband was very wary,

but I think that's because he was looking out for me.

But my daughter pushed me.

She's like, "You've got to do it, Mum, you've got to do it."

My mum's always spoke about her brother.

She's always mentioned him, and I know that she's wanted to

get in contact with him for quite a long time.

I've said to her as well,

"You need to do it, cos if you don't you're never going to know."

Determined to strike while the iron was hot,

Mary's daughter Elena contacted the Salvation Army.

But as Mary didn't know Lennie's age, they had to give them

three possible dates of birth.

I didn't think for a minute,

actually, that the Salvation Army would be

able to find him, because on my form there was so little information.

I even said to me daughter, "There's no chance of finding anybody,"

with the little snippets of what I'd got.

Mary may have thought it was scant information to go on,

but for the family finders, it was the perfect starting point.

With that information, we would take that

and apply to the General Register Office for birth certificates

and ask them to send us

copies to establish which date of birth was the correct one.

Once we had Leonard's birth information,

we were able to find him pretty quickly.

It turned out that Leonard wasn't living too far from where Mary

had last seen him, and we were able to send him a letter straight away.

The Salvation Army letter informs a lost relative a family member

would like to get in touch.

The person can then decide how to respond.

I received this letter, and, to be honest, I didn't know how I felt.

I didn't know if I was shocked, surprised, mortified or what.

And I didn't know how to react, like...

..you know, so I didn't immediately say, "Well, reply to the letter."

I didn't know what to do. As well, I was scared, as well. I don't know.

I don't know how to explain it.

Lennie decided to proceed, but with caution.

He called the office and said

that he would love to hear from his sister

and that he'd like initially to have a letter from her via our office.

The letter-forwarding service that we offer is something that's

taken up in quite a lot of cases, and people sometimes are nervous

about being in touch with their relative after such a long time.

It's a good way to break the ice without disclosing anything

personal, like address or contact details.

Mary had an agonising wait to discover the news.

'I didn't hear anything then for about four weeks,

'and then I got a letter.'

30 years after last setting eyes on her brother, the contents of this

letter would determine whether or not Mary would ever see Lennie again.

So I opened it, and I said, "They found him, they found him!"

So I set to that night and wrote just a few short lines

and enclosed a photo.

Lennie may have asked for the letter,

but its arrival was no less overwhelming for that.

The emotions I had when I received the letter?

Everything. Joy, sadness, shock, horror...

'I had to pinch meself sometimes, to say, "Is this really happening?"'

It's crazy.

It's good, but it's crazy.

But it was the photograph Mary

had enclosed which had the biggest impact.

When Mary sent me the letter,

she put a photograph of me what I didn't even know existed.

And then that's when I looked at it and I thought, "Wow! Who's this?"

HE LAUGHS

And it's me and Mary when we was kids.

And, oh, straight away I had to photocopy it, blow it up.

It's everywhere. It's on me laptop, it's on the wall. It's everywhere.

Leonard's story begins with his father in 1963.

When he first got here, he had to find lodgings,

and that's where he met my birth mother.

That person was Mary's mother.

And obviously...

two and two equals Lennie!

Soon after that, Sydney's wife and children arrived from Jamaica.

When my dad had found his own place to live,

he sent for me mum to come over with my brothers and sister.

Lennie grew up with his dad's family in south London,

unaware of his true origins.

I just had a normal childhood.

Y'know, like, I didn't feel different, y'know, I didn't...

Y'know, I didn't look at meself and think,

"I'm a duck, you lot are chickens," you know?

Lennie struggles to remember exactly how

he learnt the truth about where he'd come from.

I can't remember when it first came up or how it came up.

But my mum explained about my birth mother.

But he found it hard to cope with the revelation.

I didn't want to know, because as far as I was concerned,

I'm with my mother. I've still got my mother today, you know?

So I suppose, in a way, that's why I put it to the back of me mind

and just forgot all about it and just got on with life.

Lennie has no memory of living with Mary as a tiny baby

and can only vaguely remember her visit to London in 1979.

She was at the house, and, y'know, I wasn't rude to her, but...

Because I didn't know who she was.

And I just totally ignored her.

And it's only at a later date I found out that she was my sister.

But the past is now the past, and tomorrow brother

and sister will be reunited for the first time in their adult lives.

There's so much we've got to say to each other.

In fact, there's that much, I don't know where to start.

Apart from saying sorry. That's the first thing, of course.

In recent years, there's been a boom in independent family finders

who can help track down missing loved ones.

One such authority is Derbyshire-based Charlie Watson.

It's commonplace for people to want me to undertake enquiries to try

and find something special in the family.

But Charlie doesn't just delve into his clients' past,

he also helps them track down living relatives who

they may not have seen in years, if at all.

Many of my clients are actually in their later years,

who have suddenly taken an interest in trying to find out

about their families, whether they're living or dead.

Recently, Charlie was contacted by a woman desperate to

track down her missing family and to finally unravel a long-standing

mystery surrounding exactly who she was and where she had come from.

81-year-old Linda Wright is a retired musician who now

lives in North Yorkshire.

Born in 1934, she grew up in Southport, Merseyside.

An only child, she was brought up by the couple

she assumed were her birth mother and father.

When I was young, I went to a private day school, and it was very

old-fashioned, and occasionally we had air raids over the town.

So we slept every night in an Anderson shelter,

underneath the kitchen table.

Music was her biggest passion,

and she would spend many evenings glued to the family wireless.

One night, we were listening to a lovely violinist, so I said,

"I want to learn one of those."

And that was Sunday, and on Tuesday I'd started.

In three years, I was playing quite good concertos.

And then I got a scholarship to the Royal Manchester College of Music,

and I went there for three years.

Linda passed her musical studies with distinction

and went on to become a professional violinist.

By this time, I'd already met my husband-to-be, Cliff Wright.

Linda and Cliff got married in 1954.

Then, later that year, he got a posting to a new

position as band leader to the Border Regiment, based in Berlin.

I was 20, and I'd never been abroad.

And eventually, I realised that I hadn't got a passport

and I hadn't got any...

..any piece of paper that said who I was.

So I rang my dad up, and he came across with a...

well, my marriage certificate.

But then I said, "Well, haven't I got a birth certificate?"

Linda's dad was initially unable to produce her birth certificate,

and the possible implications began to dawn on her.

I started to have a suspicion then, and then he told me I was adopted.

The news that her mum and dad weren't her birth parents

was shock enough for Linda, but when

she pushed to know more, the details behind her adoption were hazy,

to say the least.

He told me that he'd gone to Barnardo's and chosen me

for my lovely smile.

Hardly likely at one month old, when you've got no teeth, is it?

It was only years later, on the night of her father's

funeral, that Linda's auntie, Iris, challenged this story.

"What did your father tell you?"

"Oh," I said, "he told me he'd been to Barnardo's and picked me out

"for my big smile."

And she said, "Oh, not that story again."

She said, "I'll tell you the real story."

This news came as a huge shock, because now Linda had two

conflicting stories about how she came to be adopted.

In her Auntie Iris's version, Linda's music-loving adoptive parents

had long wanted a child of their own, and not just any old child.

They couldn't have any children. And they were very musical,

loved opera and all sorts of things, and just wanted a musician.

And they heard about this child in Yorkshire.

Their prayers were answered in the form of an unusual news

story in the local paper.

An opera singer was putting her daughter up for adoption.

"Young opera singer has unfortunate liaison."

And of course I was the result.

So they arranged to adopt me on the spot.

As the years passed, Linda never stopped wondering about her mother

and, more importantly, whether there might be anyone else out there.

I thought, "Wouldn't it be fantastic

"if I actually had some brothers and sisters?"

It was time to bring in expert help in the shape of genealogist

and family finder Charlie Watson.

What Linda had in her possession was an adoption order

and a birth certificate, which really isn't very much

but not entirely unexpected,

because we're going back quite a few years now, to the 1930s,

and it's fairly commonplace to find very few documents that one can use.

But armed with what little he had, Charlie set to work.

The adoption order will give you

the name of the court that made the order,

so it was necessary to write to the court to see whether they had any

records, an adoption file relating to that particular adoption.

Charlie's investigations unearthed a name for Linda's birth mother,

Dorothy Turner.

Dorothy was no longer alive. But did she have any other children?

I started to look for Linda's birth mother's parents,

so that'd be Linda's grandparents, and what

I finally managed to do was evidence of their marriage by looking online.

By accessing scores of online records, Charlie managed to get

a clearer picture of Linda's history and family tree.

That whole process took probably two to three months

and eventually resulted in my sending out four letters to people.

These four letters were sent to potential close relatives of Linda.

We had one positive response,

and one positive response is pretty much all you need.

One will do!

Charlie's sleuthing had paid off. Linda did indeed have siblings.

And, 270 miles away, in the Brecon Beacons, one of them,

Bridgett, was about to receive a

phone call that would change her life.

My remaining brother, Richard, called me up and said,

"A genealogist has been in touch with me saying that there's a lady

"that would like to contact us, who's our sister."

Born 15 years after Linda, Bridgett grew up with her birth parents

and two elder brothers.

But while Linda spent her adult life wondering

whether she had any siblings, Bridgett

and her brothers had been put in the picture much earlier.

When my mother died in 1999, my father got us all together

and said, "I've got some news,"

and he told us that we had... a sister, which was a shock,

because we'd always been a three and suddenly we were a four.

It was a bit of a bombshell, I have to say.

Remarkably, just like the sister she'd never met,

Bridgett has also spent her life steeped in music.

I had a passion for music right from the start.

I just have a musical brain.

Bridgett and her partner, Brendan,

run an opera company, an uncanny echo of the story Linda was told,

that her mother was a young opera singer.

I've spent all my life in opera. That's what I do...and have done.

Bridgett and her brothers had decided to let sleeping dogs lie

and not go looking for Linda...

until she came looking for them.

Suddenly, we got this call saying, "There's a lady wants to find you."

So we couldn't really believe it.

I went, "Oh, God!" at the time!

And then we just talked about it and I said,

"Well, of course we've got to meet her."

Three months after his first meeting with Linda, Charlie contacted

her with the news she had desperately been hoping to hear.

"Bingo! I've found your family."

I was excited! Yes, of course I was.

"I really have got a family. Oh, gosh!"

The sisters have already met once, briefly.

Tomorrow they'll be reunited again

with two whole lifetimes to catch up on.

In London, Mary Kitchen and her younger brother, Lennie,

have been separated for over 30 years.

Today, they'll be reunited after being brought

together by the family finders at the Salvation Army.

We've found each other but I haven't spoken to him verbally as yet.

So obviously I know he's a cockney,

but I don't know if he'll understand me!

Us Northerners, y'know!

The last time Mary made the journey to London to see Lennie,

he was a teenager who barely acknowledged her.

Today, she's hoping for a very different reception.

Very nervous!

But excited.

A nice nervousness.

She's shaking!

-Aren't you shaking?

-Yeah, I am.

-I don't know if you need to be nervous.

-I know. I know.

You're all right.

It's just weird being here and it all going to happen.

Lennie has brought his partner, Dana, along for support.

-How are you feeling, babe?

-Scared. Frightened.

-Are you still sick?

-Apprehensive. Yeah, very sick.

But that's nerves.

Lennie is the first to arrive.

And he faces an anxious wait.

I can't believe how stressed out I am.

Sick. Terri... Ohhh...

I bet she cries.

-Will you cry?

-I don't think... Well, no, I'm a man, I won't cry, no.

SHE CHUCKLES

No!

At last!

HE SOBS

Found you at last.

I'm s...

-..sorry.

-No need to be!

-I can't... I can't talk.

-It's all right, it's all right.

I can't...

I'm sorry, this is...

..Dana.

With a tearful Lennie lost for words, Mary decides to bring in her

daughters, his nieces, to help break the ice.

THEY GREET EACH OTHER

-How are you?

-All right.

Oh, they're proper Northerners, they are!

-You all right there?

-They your children, yeah?

Without Elena in particular, none of this would ever have happened.

It's down to you, isn't it? It's all down to you.

-It is.

-I just pushed her, cos...

she wanted to do it for many, many years,

and she's always talked about you, so I was like, "Right..."

Everyone talks about me, don't they?

THEY LAUGH

I were just like, "Right, that's it,

"we're doing it whether you like it or not."

She made me sit down and fill it all out...

-the bits that we could fill out. It was really sketchy.

-Yeah.

-I wouldn't even know where to start.

-No.

-All I know is "Mary, Yorkshire".

That's all I would have known.

I'm just glad that I found my little brother. New beginnings, this.

-New beginnings.

-Yeah.

-New start.

-We've got a lot of catching up to do.

-Oh, yeah!

As soon as I saw her...

..I was struck speechless.

And I couldn't stop crying!

For him to have that reaction when he met me I think was pure relief

and gladness that he did actually meet me, so it was wonderful.

It was a nice feeling.

My mum's going to be a lot happier now,

cos she doesn't have that sense of not knowing.

She knows now, and she knows that Lennie feels the same way she feels.

THEY LAUGH

I'm going to suggest that he comes up to Huddersfield

and we show him around, and we're just going to be in touch loads.

In Yorkshire, 81-year-old Linda Wright had been given up

for adoption but was told that her birth mother was an opera singer,

which makes sense, as Linda's very musical herself.

Keen to discover more and desperate to know

if she had any other family out there,

Linda asked genealogist Charlie Watson to help, and he managed

to track down her sister Bridgett, who, remarkably, is an opera singer.

The two sisters have only met on one previous occasion.

Today, Bridgett is making the trip to Yorkshire to see Linda on home

turf for the very first time.

It's fantastic to have people that actually are of the same bloodline.

I'm off to see Linda for the second time in my life,

so there's lots to catch up on.

And it feels as though there's loads to talk about still.

I've been alone all my life

except for my husband and my two sons.

I never had any other family.

Linda and Bridgett have a lifetime to catch up on

and a whole host of unanswered questions to consider.

Hello!

-Hello!

-You've been left out here for ages!

-Yeah, been waiting for ages!

-Hello, darling.

-Hello.

Come and sit down.

Bridgett has brought along some photos of their mother

so Linda can finally get a sense of what she was really like.

Have you seen that one?

-That was Mum.

-Really?

-Yeah.

-Oh!

I don't know, I suppose she's in her early 40s there.

-Mm!

-That's a younger one. That'd be when she was in her 20s.

-Well, that's nice, isn't it?

-Yeah, that's nice.

See, she looks like you, doesn't she?

I feel as if I look like that sometimes.

Well, you've got the same mouth, you see.

-Yes, it is, it's the mouth, isn't it?

-And the nose.

We've both got that nose, yes.

And the similarities don't end there.

Both sisters are musicians and, according to one story Linda

was told as a child, it's because their mother was an opera singer.

I had, from my aunt, the story that my foster mother and father,

who were Vero and Irene... my father was a journalist, Vero was

a journalist, and he got me into all sorts of things.

-Fiddled it out.

-Yes, fiddled it out.

This may well be the story that Linda was told by her aunt,

but her father had told her a very different version of events,

and this opera-singer story is certainly news to Bridgett,

who grew up with their mum.

It's a mystery. I mean, obviously Mum...

Somewhere in there is a very, very strong musical

connection, isn't there, considering

I've made my life in opera and music? So...

But what I remember of Mum is, bless her, that she

smoked up to 60 a day for a long, long time in her life, coughed,

and I never heard her sing, ever.

However musical their mother really was,

these two sisters are definitely singing from the same hymn sheet.

You can't get away from it,

there's a very spooky connection that we're both in music.

-There is rather, isn't there?

-Yeah.

-Yes.

And I think, erm, we're very fundamentally a little bit...

We're quite alike in a lot of ways.

-Yes. A good sense of humour.

-Yes!

We see the ridiculous very easily.

-Yes, yes. I think that's a saving grace, don't you?

-Absolutely, yes!

Linda and Bridgett may have missed the chance to perform together

when they were young, but today they're bringing their musical

talents together for the very first time.

I think it's a shame, really, that I didn't do this earlier.

Have a hug. Have a hug!

-You'll have to kneel down!

-THEY LAUGH

Good lass. You're lovely.