Episode 7 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 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.

Tracking down lost family members has never been easier.

The internet has made the tools of the trade available to anyone.

And for those who lack the time or expertise

to search for themselves, there's a whole host

of family finding organisations, big and small, ready to help.

Who're you trying to trace?

Your brother, all right...

The busiest of them all

is the Salvation Army's Family Tracing Service.

Over the year, we are looking at over 2,000 cases

that we're successful in finding

the family members who have,

for one reason or another, lost contact with each other.

Just a few months ago,

the Salvation Army Family Finders were approached by a man desperate

to track down the cousin he hadn't seen since they were small boys.

Often, a death in the family can be the reason why people contact us

to look for relatives relating to that family.

This was the case with Brian,

who wanted us to look for his cousin, Denis,

after his brother, Tony, had passed away.

78-year-old Brian Read grew up with his brother Tony and cousin Denis

in south-east London during the Second World War.

Born a long time ago, 1937.

My brother was born two years before me, but lived mostly in Abbey Wood.

Brian and Tony grew up with their mum, Doris, and father, Don.

And life centred around the house of their grandmother,

Nanny Stubbington.

Mum was a Stubbington and Abbey Wood Road was the centre of life

as far as the Stubbingtons were concerned.

Another regular at number 34 was Brian and Tony's cousin, Denis.

Denis was born on the 8th of December, 1934,

and Tony was born the very next day.

So both my mother, Doris, and my Auntie Gertrude, Denis's mother,

were in the hospital at the same time,

and I think this is why they grew up together and were great friends.

It was a very happy time, despite the Second World War.

As the war escalated, Brian's father was called up to fight in Italy

and for a short time, the boys were evacuated to Scarborough.

All we wanted to do was get home.

And I think eventually what happened was that...

When Mum came up and she took us home, the war wasn't over,

she just came and took us home.

She realised that, you know, we weren't having a good time.

Brian's mum managed to find them a home above the local fish and chip shop,

but while living there, they almost fell victim

to German bombing themselves.

We were actually down in the chip shop buying some chips,

and this bomb came down with one hell of a whistle.

And the chippy just grabbed hold of Tony and I

and shoved us under the counter.

Thankfully, the bomb missed the chip shop,

but the jam factory next door wasn't so lucky.

SOUND OF FALLING BOMBS

There was Tony, there was me, there was Denis.

And I think we had bread and jam for tea for the next several months.

Brian's father survived the war, and on his return,

the family moved to a new house a few miles away.

We had two very happy years at Red Lion Lane,

but then Dad came home one day and said, "Mum's ill".

She'd been taken ill at work.

Brian's mum's condition soon got worse.

Dad came home one day...

His face just collapsed.

And he just said, "She's gone."

I always remember what Denis said.

First thing he said was...

.."Does this mean that Tony and Brian can come and live with us now, Mum?"

Which I thought was quite... Rather nice.

I've never forgotten that.

His wife's death hit Brian's father hard,

and the family closed ranks.

Years passed, and Brian and Tony lost touch with Denis

as they started families of their own.

Tony got married.

I got married shortly thereafter.

But Brian never forgot about his cousin.

I was thinking about him all the time and what had happened to him.

I thought, "Right, I'll try and find Denis now."

And, um... But I couldn't.

Then, just last year,

tragedy struck once more.

Tony was killed in an accident.

When Tony died...

That was a time when I just felt that I had to,

I HAD to contact Denis, because I knew that he would have

some good memories that we could share together.

Despite having seen or heard nothing of Denis in 70 years,

Brian was determined to track him down.

I started to do some serious research just to try and find him.

Brian's digging took him via various family finding websites

on a journey into his family's past.

I found children, grandchildren...

where people had got married etc,

but then always came up against a dead end.

Brian gave up all hope of ever seeing Denis again.

But a chance encounter was about to open new doors to his search.

Andrea Wood lives in Surrey with her husband, John,

and sons Luke and James.

A classic nuclear family,

and very different to her own experiences, growing up.

My mum and my dad got married at a very young age.

I think my mum was 17.

And she fell pregnant and had me at 19.

But things obviously didn't work out, because it was way too young.

By the time of Andrea's birth, her father had already left home.

I'm not too sure of the whole history of it,

but he didn't see me.

Andrea was brought up by her mum and her grandparents.

The father she'd never met simply wasn't discussed.

My mum didn't really speak to me about him.

But Andrea would soon have a father figure

and it was party thanks to her that her mum remarried.

When my mum first met my stepdad, we were on holiday and I actually made

friends with his daughter and his son

and then my mum and he got chatting.

They got married not too long afterwards.

From being an only child, Andrea was now part of a growing family

and as she got older, she began to question just who she was

and where she'd come from.

My stepdad pushed me...

"You need to go and find your dad,

"you need to meet your biological dad,"

but obviously, I didn't act on that straight away, sadly.

I wondered about him, just wondered if I was anything like him,

but at that point in time,

maybe I wasn't quite ready psychologically and emotionally.

SHE LAUGHS

After a lifetime with no contact from her father,

Andrea's 18th birthday brought a wholly unexpected surprise.

I actually got a birthday card from my biological dad,

but at that point, I was a very hot-headed teenager

and I looked at it and I thought, "Oh - happy birthday from Pete.

"Well..." And I didn't really think much of it.

Sadly.

Putting the card to the back of her mind, Andrea got on with life,

meeting and marrying John and starting a family of her own.

It was only with the death of John's father

that Andrea decided the time was right to go looking for her dad.

It made her realise that life's a bit too short,

so I always used to wind her up and say, "You'd never actually do it!"

John turned round and said, "Oh, you'll never trace him.

"You've been saying that for years. You won't do it."

John's teasing spurred Andrea into action.

She went straight online and with just a few clicks of a mouse,

brought up the name of a firm of family finders.

All right. That sounds like something we can help you with.

What information do you have?

Finder Monkey is one of a number of agencies that use

a combination of experience, contacts

and publicly accessible information to track people down.

Yeah, how can I help?

When Andrea first came to us,

she supplied us with some basic information, so she knew the name of

the person she was looking for,

so she knew she was looking for a Peter David Bond.

She knew his father's name and she also was able to tell us

that he'd married her mum in 1966 in Reading.

For the experts, this was plenty to be going on.

What we managed to find in this case was a Peter D Bond,

born in Reading in 1946.

Could this be their man?

Everything hinged upon whether the available information

about this Peter's parents matched the details Andrea had given.

What we found was that a Norman Peter Bond had married in Reading,

in 1941, a Nellie A Bendell,

so we were then confident that the birth record we'd found

related to the right person because it related to the right

father's name, was the right age and in the right area.

It was the breakthrough Andrea had been waiting for.

I got a phone call saying, "OK, we've found your man."

I was so excited, so nervous.

So then I had to think about - OK, well, I need to write him a letter.

I've got his address, I need to write him a letter.

But how do you go about writing to a father you've never met?

Andrea gave it her best shot.

"Dear Peter,

"I know this letter may come as a surprise after all these years,

"but it has been written in my head so many times over many years.

"However, I know now that I'm mature enough to deal with whatever

"the outcome."

Andrea posted the letter off,

crossed her fingers and waited to hear back from her father.

I was going crazy.

"You heard anything?" "No." "You got anything?" "No." And I was getting...

You remember? I was getting a little bit tense, thinking,

"Obviously, he doesn't want to know."

Two weeks passed with no news, but 80 miles away,

unknown to Andrea, her letter was lying unopened and unread.

Only time would tell if it would ever reach its target.

It's been nearly 70 years

since Brian Read last saw his cousin Denis.

Brian's been searching tirelessly for Denis, without success,

but a chance encounter in a barber shop has just changed everything.

For some crazy reason,

I was relating to my hairdresser

that I'd been trying to find my cousin and she said,

"Have you tried the Salvation Army?" And I thought, "Crikey!"

Brian was able to provide us with Denis' full name,

his date of birth and his last known address, and often,

this information is all that we need to start an inquiry.

But what looked like being a straightforward case

proved unexpectedly tricky.

We used all the information given, but after two attempts,

we were unsuccessful in making contact with him.

I was thinking, "Oh, they're having problems.

"If they've found anything, they'd let me know."

The family finders decided to cast their next wider

and their digging unearthed a possible daughter for Denis.

We believed it was her,

matching the information that we'd been given from Brian,

so we wrote to that address,

in the hope that she was the person we were looking for.

Their hunch proved to be spot-on.

It turned out the reason Denis had proved so elusive

is that he's relocated to the Costa del Sol.

My daughter rang me and said,

"Dad, the Salvation Army have been on, want to know -

"do I know you?" And I said, "What's it about?" She said, "I don't know.

"Do you mind if I give them your phone number?"

I said, "No, I'm not hiding from anybody."

And then when I found out it was Brian, that was great.

I just remember him in short pants and curly hair

and about ten years old.

Literally, that's the last time I can remember seeing him.

After losing touch with Brian and Tony, Denis lived a colourful life.

He served in the Household Cavalry,

before becoming first a policeman and then a private detective.

Retired and married for a fourth time, he now lives in Spain.

Tony and Brian were my mum's sister's boys and I know we,

as the older kids,

were always trying to get rid of the younger ones!

But in post-war Britain, losing touch was easy,

especially for a free spirit like Denis.

Shortly after they moved, I also had to move.

So, I was a bit of a nomad for a while, moving from place to place.

But despite the passing years and the move abroad,

now the Salvation Army had tracked Denis down.

Brian was at home with his wife Pauline when the call came through.

It's the best thing, in my point of view, that could ever have happened.

Mm-hm.

-After Tony.

-Yeah.

And the upset and the devastation that you went through then.

-It's the best thing that could have happened for you.

-Yeah.

And I hope that when you

and Denis get together, that you'll get the comfort from that.

-I think I will, Pauline.

-That nobody else can give you.

-That's it.

And if you don't give me a hug right now, I'm going to hit you.

BRIAN LAUGHS

Overjoyed, Brian couldn't wait to arrange the reunion.

Before I could do anything, Denis phoned me,

so that was absolutely terrific.

You know, we spoke after 70 years, I think, as far as I can remember...

We were only sort of ten years old when I last saw him.

After 70 years apart,

the two cousins wasted no time in arranging to meet up.

The mere fact that we had this connection, I think,

is going to be quite emotional for me.

Denis has flown over from Spain and today,

he and Brian will meet for the first time since they were small boys.

This is about Brian and Denis, with Tony there on their shoulders.

I just hope I'm not going to get too emotional.

I'm feeling a little bit nervous about it, but it's exciting, really.

It's 2,000 miles and 70 years between us.

-Denis.

-Ha-ha!

Hello, mate! Oh!

Oh, Denis!

You are a little bit shorter than me.

I was wondering if you were bigger or smaller.

-No, I knew you'd be up there somewhere.

-Oh, great.

-Gee whizz!

-I should have put my tie on, Denis.

-No!

It's the old army training, ain't it?

-I left it off at the last minute.

-Good luck to you.

-You're comfortable, I expect. It's great.

-Oh, dear.

-You're looking all right.

-What have we got...?

-That's me Lifeguards... Old Comrades Association.

-Brilliant.

-Lifeguards Association.

-Absolutely wonderful.

-Shall we sit down?

-Yeah, great.

-Yeah.

I got a few photographs in there for you, Denis. Yeah.

And you've got some for me that I haven't seen before.

It's brilliant to see you. Really fantastic.

Fantastic's not the word for it, Denis.

A lifetime may have passed since their last meeting,

but it's like these two old friends have never been apart.

Cor, look at the cheeky smiles on those two!

Chubby chops.

-Tony looks great, doesn't he?

-Yeah.

Brian and Denis have lived separate lives as adults,

but their childhood was spent very much together.

And today, they've planned a pilgrimage

to the streets where they grew up.

I tell you what. That is so familiar, isn't it?

-Huh?

-Be nice to go and see what it's like now.

-See what it's like now.

-Yeah?

-Let's go and see it, Denis.

I'd really very much like to see that.

-Let's give it a...

-Yeah.

-Let's give it a go.

-Great stuff.

As Brian and Denis get closer to their old neighbourhood of Abbey Wood,

Brian's thoughts turn to his mother,

who died shortly after the end of the war.

Do you remember what you said, Denis?

-About her?

-When you learned that Mum had died?

-You don't remember what you said to your mother?

-No.

-You said...

"Does this mean that Tony and Brian can come and live with us now, Mum?"

-Oh, God.

-Yeah. I've never forgotten that, Denis.

I thought that was lovely. Yeah.

I really did. I've never, ever forgotten that.

Ray Huntley lived in that house there.

THEY LAUGH

Cor, dear, oh, dear.

-I tell you what. This hasn't changed, Denis.

-It hasn't.

-Apart from the cars and the wheelie bins.

-It hasn't.

An incendiary bomb went down the chimney in one of these here.

For Brian, Denis and the rest of their extended family,

life in the 1940s revolved around their grandmother's house.

It's the obvious place to start.

-Oh, this is fantastic!

-It hasn't changed.

-The hedge hasn't changed.

-No. It hasn't. Still well kept.

Well, I'll be jiggered. Look at that.

Yeah.

Brilliant, innit?

Now, I can remember how proud I was

-when I could jump down those five steps.

-Yeah. Yeah.

KNOCKING

-Nobody's home.

-I think we're out of luck here.

I think we are, yeah.

BRIAN LAUGHS

-I can't jump down them now!

-DENIS LAUGHS

Just around the corner from their grandmother's house

was the chip shop where Brian lived during the war

with his mother and brother.

It's where I used to live!

-Crikey.

-This used to be a big window. The door used to be there.

That's where we lived. Up there in there.

And when the bomb dropped on the jam factory,

we were actually - Tony and I - were in there, buying some chips,

and the chippy got hold of us and shoved us under the counter and said,

"You stay there."

Cos this bomb was bloody whistling down. Yeah.

For both cousins,

it's been a welcome return to their old stamping grounds

and the neighbourhood they thought they'd never see again.

Brilliant. You've done well.

It's been absolutely bloody marvellous, Denis. It really has.

I've met Denis after all these years and... Oh, what a character!

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder.

I suppose that's starting to ring true

because I feel closer to him now than I've ever felt.

Brian can only imagine what Tony would have made of meeting Denis

and visiting their childhood haunts after all these years.

I think - and I don't believe in that sort of thing - but if he were

watching and listening, I think he would be absolutely delighted.

Andrea Wood used a family finding agency to track down Peter,

the father she'd never met.

She sent him a letter, but two and a half weeks passed and still,

she'd heard nothing.

There's me sitting there, thinking, OK, well,

he obviously doesn't want to know me or he's still not around...

It was the longest two and a bit weeks that I'd ever, ever had.

But just when she'd given up hope, Peter returned from a long holiday

to find Andrea's letter waiting for him.

It was really so unexpected.

I can't think of anything else that would have surprised me more,

I was well, well pleased.

Shocked and delighted, Peter immediately wrote back,

and Andrea finally knew her search was over.

I felt so happy...

and so relieved.

The relief was expressed through tears.

I couldn't control the happiness.

Peter lives near Newbury in Berkshire.

Now 69, he was barely 21 when he married Andrea's mother.

I remember when Andrea was born.

You know, she was a lovely little thing, she really was.

But I was still determined to do what I wanted to do,

even though it wasn't the right thing.

And it really wasn't the right thing.

I've made one or two decisions in my life that I'm not proud of,

and that is definitely the major one.

Peter had chosen to walk away,

but he never stopped thinking about his daughter.

When I did try and get in touch,

it was a card on her 18th birthday.

She made it quite plain that she didn't want to know,

which is understandable.

After that, I left it alone, which is fair enough -

you don't encroach on somebody if they don't want to know.

Having given up hope of ever seeing his daughter again,

Andrea's letter offered Peter the chance

to start a whole new chapter in his life.

They wasted no time in arranging to meet at Peter's home in Berkshire.

When I actually drove into his drive,

I had to get myself...

I had to get myself under control. I was so nervous.

Oh, I was a bag of nerves.

I really was a bag of nerves.

I think I polished everything about ten times.

I got out of the car and went and knocked on the door,

and he opened the door, and he said, "Hello, Andrea."

And I just put my arms around him and said,

"Lovely to meet you, Pete."

We couldn't stop hugging one another. I mean, absolutely amazing.

I've got to say, I had a tear in my eye.

Since their first meeting,

Peter and Andrea have been making up for lost time,

spending weekends and family holidays together

and giving Peter the chance to be a grandad.

The first thing we did was give him a massive hug.

Yeah, and we hand-shaked him and everything.

But there's one special occasion that Peter's never been present for.

He's missed all of Andrea's birthdays,

but what she doesn't know is that's about to change.

Oh! Here we go. Awesome.

Oh, dear. Happy birthday.

-Fancy seeing you!

-Happy birthday.

There's a surprise!

-There you go.

-Oh, my word!

-Happy birthday.

-Thank you.

'It was lovely when my dad turned up today.

'Yeah, complete and utter surprise, didn't expect it.'

When I saw his reflection in the mirror,

yeah, it was just... It was just awesome.

-It's nice to see you.

-Lovely.

Absolutely incredible.

To actually get here on her birthday was a rare treat,

and I know that she loved it. Bless her.

Yes!