Episode 4 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 have 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 other people can't get,

cos 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.

That was the start of finding my family.

Across the UK, there are a range of family-finding organisations

who will trace your relatives for a small fee.

Often people who have lost contact through being fostered out

at a young age, they often contact us

and want to be back in touch with their siblings.

But you don't always have to use a specialist agency.

Many people do some DIY genealogy to find their relatives.

Nowadays, you sit down at your computer, you click the mouse

and, hopefully, the computer will do the searching for you.

Which is exactly how Jonathan Fryer was traced by his family.

Jonathan was adopted at the age of 18 months.

I was born in June 1950, in Manchester, and grew up

in Eccles, which is part of Salford, now part of Greater Manchester.

And I was adopted into a family and had an older adopted sister.

My adoptive family never made any attempt to hide the fact

I was adopted and so, really, from the earliest age

I knew that I wasn't really their child.

Jonathan never felt part of the family.

I very much felt like a fish out of water.

Although it was materially very comfortable

and I'm sure they tried to provide everything that they could for me,

there was a real disconnect between me

and, particularly, my adopted father, who was much older.

He was quite far right wing, quite intolerant

and, from a very early age, I had my mind open to the wider world.

Despite the openness with which he learnt of his adoption,

Jonathan was unable to discover any of the details.

One of the most frustrating things, which really made me very angry

as a child, was that I knew that my adopted parents had met my mother.

They refused point-blank to tell me who she was.

My adopted mother just said one time, "Oh, nobody special."

And this really ate me up inside. It became a real bone of contention.

I was angry about it, but they were even angrier.

My adopted father said, "You mustn't keep asking, you mustn't.

"You're so ungrateful."

When I said, "Surely there must be some documents or something,"

they said, "No, we've destroyed everything. You'll never find out."

And when I was 13, my adopted father actually said,

"I wish I hadn't adopted you."

Jonathan put thoughts of his origins to the back of his mind,

and after he left home,

carved out a career as a war correspondent in Vietnam.

Then, in 1975, the law regarding adoption documentation changed,

allowing all adoptees over the age of 18 to access their records.

I realised there was now a possibility to do

a bit of detective work and to find out who I really am.

Jonathan was now finally able to obtain

his original birth certificate for the first time.

I'll never forget the day it arrived because it arrived

through the post - this is months after I'd started this process.

And I opened it and there, suddenly,

was a completely different set of names

and I was no longer Jonathan Harold Fryer,

which I never really felt I was, but Graeme Leslie Morton.

-TEARFULLY:

-And, suddenly, there was my mother's name.

And I felt a huge relief.

It was very emotional.

When you've wanted to know for years...

and, suddenly, there it was - Joyce Morton, formerly Ashcroft,

with an address. Who was the father? Just a black line.

And this was really the key to open the door to the paper trail.

Months of research at the National Register Office revealed

Jonathan also had an older half-sister.

Another piece of the jigsaw had been put in, but it's not a jigsaw that

you do overnight. It's a jigsaw you can take months or even years to do.

In my case, it was years.

Because, actually, each piece that's put in wrenches you.

It's exciting, but it's also very difficult.

Jonathan's birth certificate stated the address his mother

had lived at when he was born.

So, he took the train from London to Manchester, in the hope

someone might know where she was now.

I came up alone and found this street

and the house over there, where she had lived.

And it took me a few minutes to pluck up the courage

to knock on the door and, then, of course, there was nobody there.

I went to the house next door

and there was a very nice elderly lady there who invited me in.

And she said, "Oh, I remember her very well.

"She was a very beautiful young woman with a great eye

"for a man in uniform." And I thought, "Great.

"Sounds just the sort of woman I would have loved."

I was sad, as well, because one half of me

had really hoped that this would be an opportunity to meet her.

And the most disappointing thing was when the neighbour,

although she remembered her very well, said she moved away years ago.

No idea where she was and, so, I thought the chance of ever

tracking her down would be extremely remote.

There was something at the back of me sort of saying,

"Well, if my mother knew where I was, knew who'd adopted me,

"maybe she would have got in touch, if she wanted to."

Having, in a sense,

been rejected, I just couldn't bear to go through that again.

And so I didn't follow it up any more.

With nowhere left to go, Jonathan gave up his search.

But little did he know that someone else was already looking for him.

Sometimes, a fluke or coincidence can be the thing that brings

families together after generations apart.

In St Albans, retired geography teacher John Matthews has been

researching his family tree for nearly ten years.

I was born in 1947, in Wanstead in East London,

and my family lived in Leyton in East London.

John became a teacher, married and had a son.

He was born in 1980.

My wife passed away very shortly after he was born.

John raised his son with the help of his parents and extended family.

All through my life, the family has been the thing.

We've been part of a large family group.

Yeah, the family was everything to us.

In the course of plotting his family tree,

John got in contact with Judith Cook, the deputy town clerk

at Ongar Town Council,

to enquire about the grave records of one of his ancestors.

So I rang up Judith and said,

"Can you just check this one record for me? Winifred Holt, aged four."

And she then rang me back.

She said, "I've had some other people

"asking about this same Winifred Holt's graveyard in 1899."

The people, or rather person, who'd also been enquiring

about these same records was Christine St Alban from Australia,

who, on a visit to the UK,

had stopped to visit the grave of her great-great aunt.

A great-great aunt, it transpired, that John shares.

I just couldn't believe it.

I was absolutely flabbergasted and curious,

and, sort of, elated.

I said, "What can we do now? Where do we go from here?"

I asked Mr Matthews if it would be OK

to pass on his details to Christine and he said yes.

So I put them in touch with each other

and they found out that they were related.

I can't believe it.

After 16 years of searching for her lost English family,

Christine was absolutely thrilled to have discovered John, her cousin.

So, in the first e-mail, I write to John, I'm very formal and I say,

"Hello, Mr Matthews." Because I didn't know how he would receive us.

I didn't know if he wanted to know us.

I didn't want to put any pressure on him.

But really I was saying, "Write back! Write back!

"I need to know about you!"

And before I got onto the e-mail,

I'd had this e-mail from Australia, saying, "I think we're cousins."

And that was the night, we sat up, most of the night,

e-mailing each other backwards and forwards. It was such a thrill!

Well, I'm saying, "Who are you? What's your connection?

"Why are you looking into this family?"

It was Christine's cousin, Nana Rose,

who first emigrated to Australia almost a century ago,

leaving behind her sister Rita, who is John's grandmother.

She knew nothing about my grandmother Rita.

I knew nothing about her grandmother, so we exchanged a lot.

She sent me some photographs and I sent her some photographs.

It just blossomed from there.

We have actually found a whole new family,

we've found a whole new branch of the family.

Just a few weeks after finding cousin John, Christine,

her sister, her husband and her father have arrived in England

to meet him for the very first time.

It will be such a thrill to actually meet them.

We've been to Ongar several times now

and these people have been within a stone's throw of us all this time.

So we've been running along parallel lines

and now we've touched.

For John, the years of researching his family tree

are finally yielding what he searched for all along -

a whole new group of relatives who have travelled all the way over

from the other side of the world.

Hopefully, in a very short space of time,

I shall be driving into the council offices

where I shall meet this cousin, Christine.

I'm getting a bit nervous now!

Family is everything to us, so this is a very big day.

Very exciting.

A bit... Oh, my heart's really pounding!

Here we go!

As John waits nervously for Christine's arrival...

-All right?

-Hello, you gorgeous girl! Thank you!

..Christine is greeted by Judith,

without whom this meeting would never have happened.

Me? Oh, thank you!

Thank you.

John's nerves are getting the better of him.

It's been building up and building up to us meeting.

Quite nervous. In fact, I'm hugely nervous.

I can't believe you did this for us.

It's no problem. It's my pleasure.

I'm going to cry. I wasn't... I'm not going to cry.

DOOR OPENS

Here we go.

SHE LAUGHS

-Christine...

-Come here, you!

-Oh, dear!

-I can't believe...

-I'm so wound up, I don't know about you.

-I know.

Oh, well done for getting here. Brilliant.

Christine is wearing Nana Rose's wedding ring.

I've got Nana's wedding ring.

-Have you? Oh, that's nice. How nice is that?

-Yeah.

So...I had to wear it to show you.

-That's brilliant.

-Yeah.

-That goes back to...1920?

-Well, she wore it for...

-1919?

-She wore it for nearly 80 years.

-Good grief.

-And then my mum wore it and now I'm custodian.

-That's brilliant.

Isn't it a great shame

that we couldn't meet our older relatives earlier. Isn't it?

Well, I came to find out a lot about my other relatives from you.

And me vice-versa, so...

I can't believe it.

-This is my husband, Paul.

-Hello, Paul.

-Cousin John.

-Hello, John.

'While their grandmothers are no longer around,

'other members of John's new-found family are here to greet him.'

THEY CHUCKLE

All of us know there's a...

We've got a long way to go,

exchanging stories and information and so on.

We've got the rest of our lives now to share it together.

It's...lovely to have reconnected with this family.

It's taken us nearly 100 years to be able to reconnect the family.

So, it's a very special day and I hope...

I hope that our relatives are all watching

and are enjoying this as much as we are.

Jonathan Fryer was adopted as a baby in the 1950s,

but he was never given any details.

I knew that my adopted parents had met my mother.

They refused point-blank to tell me who she was.

When I said, "Surely there must be some documents or something?"

They said, "No, we've destroyed everything.

"You will never find out."

As an adult, he obtained his birth certificate

and discovered his real name.

I was no longer Jonathan Harold Fryer -

which I never really felt I was -

but Graeme Leslie Morton.

And he finally discovered who his real mother was.

-TEARFULLY:

-Suddenly, there was my mother's name.

And this was really the key to open the door to the paper trail.

But it wasn't just his mum he'd found -

Jonathan also discovered he had a half-sister,

but, fearing rejection,

he abandoned all hope of ever making contact

with any of his birth family.

Having, in a sense, been rejected,

I just couldn't bear to go through that again.

But what he didn't know was that his half-sister Denise

was also looking for him.

I have always known about him.

I can't remember a time that me mother sat down

and told me about him, but I've just always known about Jonathan.

Denise was born just after the end of World War II.

I was born in 1945, in Irlam, near Manchester.

Shortly after, my mother and father moved to Bristol.

And we lived there for a year and then we came back.

My mother and I came back on the train

and my father never appeared for Christmas

and I never saw him again after that.

Me mother and I lived with my grandparents in Irlam

for the next nine, ten years.

During that time, she obviously had a relationship with someone,

who, unfortunately, I don't know much about,

and found that she was pregnant.

She felt that there was no way that she could bring shame on the family

by staying at home. So as soon as she started to show, that was it.

She went away to a home for unmarried mothers.

From what she said, it sounded like a dreadful life there.

They were really made to feel as though they had to be punished

because they were unmarried mothers.

Despite the difficult decision Joyce had made, ultimately,

she may have felt that it would give the young Jonathan

the chance of a better life.

She felt as though she couldn't afford to keep a child

and offer another child any sort of a life,

so she thought she was doing the best by Jonathan,

by letting him be adopted by a couple

that she thought would give him everything that she couldn't.

She was so sorry that she couldn't have kept him

and that we couldn't have been a family together.

It's something that I don't think you ever get over.

Denise's mother Joyce later remarried

and Denise and her younger half-sister Gill

grew up in the corner shop their parents ran in the town of Eccles.

The shop was not far from where Jonathan lived and went to school.

She used to go to the school gates to see him leaving or arriving.

Just being able to see Jonathan made her feel better.

I think Mum really kept watch over him

until, probably, he went to grammar school.

She knew that he'd got a scholarship to Manchester Grammar,

which thrilled her to bits.

However strong her emotional connection to Jonathan,

Joyce didn't want to run the risk of upsetting his stable childhood.

I think me mum felt guilty all her life, really.

She was glad that he had a good life.

She didn't want to interfere in it,

because she wouldn't have wanted to ruin any part of his life.

Decades later and with her mother now in the later years of her life,

Denise felt it was time to try and track Jonathan down.

Before Mother passed away,

I wanted to find Jonathan,

because I knew Mum would have loved to have known what he was doing.

When we first got computers,

we were on various sites looking for birth details.

I didn't tell her that I was searching,

because I didn't want her to be upset if we couldn't find him.

I just wanted to surprise her and, unfortunately,

I didn't get the chance to do that,

because I looked and looked and couldn't find

any details of him, at all.

While Denise knew about Jonathan, her younger sister Gillian did not.

I just assumed that me mother had told her everything about Jonathan,

just as she'd told me,

and it wasn't until last year that we realised

that Gillian didn't know anything about Jonathan.

It was only when Denise's daughter rang Gillian,

in the course of doing the family tree,

that Gillian learnt of Jonathan's existence.

She said, "I need to ask you something.

"I've been meaning to ask you for ages and ages and I keep forgetting.

"Do you ever think about Jonathan?"

I said, "Well, Jonathan who?"

And she said, "Your brother, Jonathan!"

"I haven't got a brother...

"or have I?

"I think you'd better put your mum on."

The latest generation of internet search engines

meant Gill could find Jonathan online in no time at all.

After the phone call, I just googled "Jonathan Fryer, Eccles"

and up popped his public profile page.

It was just incredible.

In the early life section,

it says that he was born under the name of Graeme Leslie Morton

and as soon as I saw that, I thought,

"This has got to be him."

It's really strange, because ten minutes earlier,

I had no idea I had a brother

and then, ten minutes later, I've got a brother

and I've found him.

We couldn't believe that I'd been searching for years

and couldn't find him and, within ten minutes,

she'd found our brother.

It was so, so wonderful,

but heartbreaking as well, because me mum had already died

and she would have been so thrilled.

Denise then wrote to Jonathan.

Absolutely out of the blue,

I got a letter and as soon as I opened the letter

and saw the signature at the bottom - Denise -

I knew it must be her, because I'd never forgotten that name,

although it was 20 years since I'd done the search.

And she starts, "Dear Jonathan,

"this is a difficult, but exciting, letter to write

"and I hope you will not find it an intrusion into your life.

"I am quite sure that you are my half-brother.

"My mother was Joyce Morton, nee Ashcroft

"of 64 Baines Avenue, Irlam, Manchester.

"If you would be interested in filling in some of the history

"of your birth mother's side of the family

"and/or wish to have contact with Gillian and myself,

"we'd be more than happy."

And at the bottom of Denise's letter, she's written,

"P.S. Mum never forgot you, ever,

"as I will, hopefully, have the chance to tell you."

It was the most amazing feeling, suddenly to realise that,

actually, all my worries and concerns were groundless

and that, far from not wanting to have anything to do with me,

at last, I had a family who did want me.

Jonathan, Denise and Gill have since reunited.

But today they're meeting up again

to show Jonathan something of importance

he hasn't seen before.

Denise and Gill have arranged to meet Jonathan

at the former local corner shop

where they grew up with their mum, Joyce.

It's only the second time I've seen Gill.

Denise, it'll be the third time.

So, it's great to have this opportunity to...

to meet them again and also to put everything in context.

There they are.

Hello. Lovely to see you.

Nice to see you.

-Hello.

-Nice see you. And how are you?

-Oh, I'm fine, thanks.

-Good.

-It's been quite emotional, but...

-Yes, yes, yes.

-I can imagine.

Putting everything together now, all the little bits of the jigsaw.

This is number five.

This is number five, where we were brought up.

Yes, it sold everything - a real old-fashioned corner shop.

-So this bit was a shop?

-Yes, this was a shop window.

-No, it's amazing to think you were just here and...

-Yes.

-I know, and you were so near.

-Yes.

-So near.

Mother must have been able to just walk to the school.

-It's well within walking distance.

-Yes, yes, yes.

Unaware they were growing up so close to each other,

Gillian is now able to solve a lifelong mystery.

I always wondered why we ended up in Eccles.

-But now we know why.

-Now we know why, yeah.

It seems their mother, Joyce, moved to Eccles

so she could continue to keep a close eye on her son, Jonathan.

Jonathan takes them to his old primary school,

just a couple of miles away from the corner shop.

From what you've said, Denise,

I imagine when Mother came to walk by and see if she could see me,

she must have stood at these gates here.

I just felt very emotional coming around the corner, then.

Seeing the railings and...

Because she's often said, you know,

"I used to stand at the railings, looking, watching him play.

"And seeing him arriving in the morning

-"and leaving in the afternoon."

-Yeah.

I mean, it's so sad, in many ways, that she felt, understandably,

in that age, that she had to give me up,

-that it really wasn't possible...

-Oh, yes, yes.

..in that period, to keep a child in those circumstances.

-It must have been awful for her.

-Oh, dreadful.

-And to... Years looking.

-Yes, yes.

I think it must be the worst thing that could ever happen to a woman,

-having to give up a child.

-Yeah.

-The worst thing.

Really terrible.

But at least now, you know that she never forgot you,

she was always looking over you.

-Watching over you.

-Yeah.

-That's good. But it makes it harder, as well.

-Yes, yes, yes.

Jonathan now has the chance to visit

the final resting place of his mother for the first time.

And to catch up on some of the years that he's missed

not knowing his new-found siblings.

-This is Gillian and I when we were little...

-Goodness.

-..with Mum.

-Uh-huh. She certainly looks very jolly and happy.

-Oh, she was, yes.

She was a very happy person.

-That's my mum.

-There's Mum.

I can't imagine

how his life was, without knowing who he was.

And that...that must just be amazing for him to find out.

I like the way she's looking straight at you.

-Yes, yes. Yes, you've got the same colour eyes as her.

-Really?

Yes. Yeah. Neither of us have, but you've got her eyes. Yes. Yeah.

It's definitely an emotional journey for everybody.

I'm glad we did it, though.

Really glad we did it.

It's such a shame that he can't be part

of all that went on but, hopefully, we've got plenty more things

going to be happening in the future.

-We can keep in touch now the rest of our lives.

-Yeah, absolutely.

-There's no hiding from us now!

-Oh, well...

No, that's it, we're afraid you've got us now.

It is terrific that, after 64 years,

we've been able to put back together the family that was broken apart,

which none of us would have wanted at the time.

And for anyone who is in a similar situation,

it's never too late.

It's always worth trying.

It's just an amazing feeling, suddenly, to know who I am.