Episode 1 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 searches that 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 with Dad.

That was the start of finding my family.

Across Britain, there are dozens of specialist agencies

who reunite people with their families.

The biggest one is the Salvation Army

who, for a small fee, trace over 2,000 people a year.

Good afternoon, Salvation Army. Can I help you?

Along with all their other work, the Salvation Army

has been reuniting families for over 130 years.

All our caseworkers are currently working on over 200,

nearly 250 cases live, presently.

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

And this organisation has a huge global presence,

with branches in 126 countries,

so very often, the Salvation Army Family Finders

reunite people from different sides of the world.

When did you last see him there?

One such person in need of their help is 80-year-old Violet Rossini,

who's lived in Australia for nearly 50 years.

When she was around five years old,

Violet and her older sister, Kathleen,

were placed into care in Lincolnshire.

I was told my mother died when I was born. Erm...

We were taken into the children's homes

and then I was fostered out and Kathleen was adopted, I believe.

Initially, the two sisters were in the same children's home,

but they were separated when they were fostered.

However, by a quirk of fate,

Violet and Kathleen were at one point placed in foster homes

which were within walking distance of each other.

I lived in South Street and she lived round the corner,

and we met up through a friend of mine.

She knew me, but I didn't know her to start with.

And that's how it all began.

Once they'd realised how close their two foster homes were,

the two sisters used to sneak out and play with each other in secret.

But this joyful time didn't last.

My foster mother found out that I was meeting Kathleen,

and she sent me back to the home. And that was it.

I never saw Kathleen again.

No.

The last time she saw Kathleen, Violet was just eight years old,

and although her memories may have faded,

she's never forgotten her older sister.

She was the good-looking of the two. Used to be jealous of her sometimes.

She had lovely curly hair, as I remember.

I don't remember that much -

we were about the same in build and that. But the only thing

that really sticks in my mind is when she used to give me a piggyback

up Eastwood Hill, because it was a steep hill to school.

Violet moved to London when she was 14, and married when she was 20.

After her first husband died, she remarried

and in 1968, emigrated with him and her five children to Australia.

Violet was not alone in making this move to the other side of the world.

-RADIO:

-You could be on your way to a sunnier future,

on your way to Australia, a great place for families.

Starting in the late 1940s, the Australian government

wanted to entice British workers

by offering passage to the country for £10.

These travellers became known as Ten Pound Poms,

and over 1.5 million of them

made the journey to a new life down under.

Violet and her family settled happily in Australia,

but she never forgot Kathleen.

I didn't say goodbye to Kathleen

and she never got to say goodbye to me, and it was just like...

well, you might say parting of the ways.

Violet tried to trace Kathleen several times over the years,

but never had any luck.

And then, a few years ago, her granddaughter, Candace,

made one last-ditch attempt.

I have a sister and three brothers,

and I couldn't imagine life without any one of them.

So I just knew that I had to do something

to help her have that connection with Kathleen again.

I spent quite a few hours searching the internet

to try and see what information I could get,

and we had very little to go on.

And using that, I found Kathleen's birth certificate

that I surprised my grandma with for her 80th birthday.

And the look on her face when I give that to her, just...

It was more than I can even describe.

Armed with Kathleen's birth certificate,

Candace contacted her local branch of the Salvation Army

in the hope this document would now be enough

to finally reunite her grandmother with her sister.

Good afternoon, Salvation Army Family Tracing Service. How can I help you?

The London Family Tracing unit was given the case

by their Australian counterparts,

and set about trying to find Kathleen.

There are 28 Family Tracing Service offices across the world,

and this case came from our Australian colleagues.

Violet and Kathleen had been out of contact for over seven decades,

and Kathleen's name may well have changed in this period,

so the Family Tracing unit started by searching marriage certificates,

which list maiden names.

We were able to find that she'd actually married

and her name had changed to Cousins.

So that was the first step in the process,

and after that, all we had to do then is try and find her.

Just three months after Candace sent the Salvation Army

Kathleen's birth certificate, the Family Finding unit

got a solid lead on her whereabouts.

In cases like this, where we've found a possible name

or a current name for somebody,

the next step would be to check the electoral roll

to see if we can find an address for them,

and that's what we did with Kathleen.

And we were able to find one possible address, which we wrote to.

A few weeks later, we had a letter from Kathleen's daughter, Sharon,

who told us that Kathleen was really excited and really overjoyed

at the possibility of being back in contact with her family.

They called Violet in Australia with the good news.

When I got this phone call from the Salvation Army,

I thought something was wrong,

because they only said it in an ordinary voice,

and then she said, "Oh, no, it's all right, but she is in a nursing home."

And then I think we said one or two things,

and I didn't answer for a while,

and she said, "Are you all right?"

And, well, I was very emotional and made a fool of myself and cried.

And then I said something about shouting it from the rooftops,

and we just had a conversation from then on,

and she was asking me to describe how I feel and...

I just couldn't tell, you know?

It was like...

having Christmas all together. Christmas, birthdays,

the whole lot together. But yeah, it was great.

Violet couldn't wait to actually talk with her sister,

but she couldn't get her hopes up yet,

because at this stage, the decision to reconnect rested with Kathleen.

When I heard from the Army, they told me

that she'd get permission for me to write to her.

So I wrote and I explained a bit about the family and that,

and said that it was up to her to make the final decision.

Then she received the long-distance call

she'd been dreaming of all these years.

Very late one night I had a phone call,

because our time difference.

I think it was about 11 o'clock, our way.

And we had a talk,

but don't ask me what we said or what we did,

because I just can't remember. I just know it was great.

After 72 years, Violet had no shortage

of things to catch up on with her sister Kathleen.

Some good things do happen.

And it's something that's...

Well, no matter how much longer I've got,

I shall remember for all the days of my life.

Two months after hearing the news that her sister Kathleen

had finally been traced, Violet and her granddaughter Candace

arrive at London Heathrow after a 23-hour flight from Australia.

Now we have to see what sights there is.

Tomorrow, Violet will see her beloved sister again

for the first time since they were forcibly separated

when she was just eight years old.

Meanwhile, in Lincolnshire, Violet's sister Kathleen

and her daughter Sharon can barely wait.

Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.

I can't get hold of her soon enough.

It's so hard to describe how I feel. This is...

It's a dream come true for my mum, obviously.

It's something that she's wanted... oh, all your life, probably.

-Since you left.

-Yes.

So yeah, excitement, anticipation - they're all there.

-Just - oh, I can't wait.

-SHE LAUGHS

She might remember more than I do, and...

Well, I'm just hoping that we can fit the pieces together.

You know, we've both had journeys through life,

and see what comes at the end of it.

To have this opportunity to share a journey so big like this

is just amazing.

It's a miracle, really,

-and I'm glad I could be a part of that.

-So am I.

I haven't slept properly for the last couple of nights.

Once I knew they were on the plane and on their way,

I really haven't slept, cos all that's in my head

is thinking about them being here,

and seeing my mum and them reunited, and meeting her for the first time.

Oh, it's just going to be so fantastic. I just can't...

-I'm so excited, it's ridiculous.

-I wouldn't let her go.

I wouldn't want to let her go. She'd have a job to leave me.

To be quite honest,

I've been looking for Kathleen that long

that I didn't think I would see her again, no.

And I didn't think I would be making this trip. Not at my age, anyway.

But I'm glad, I am.

I'm glad I took the nerve to do it.

There are thousands of archive libraries around Britain

which are full of your family secrets

if you wish to delve into them, and most of the information is public.

In Liverpool, the local archives proved invaluable to Ron Clark

when he wanted to find out about his family history.

As a young boy in the 1950s,

Ron grew up in one of the poorest parts of the city.

Life at the time in the sort of tenement block,

living in Liverpool would have been real tough,

because times were hard anyway, money was scarce.

Ron was a was a child born out of wedlock to a single mother,

but at the time, he had no idea how difficult life was for her.

We were terribly poor, but we were also very rich,

because she brought me culture.

She taught me to read and gave me an appreciation of authors

and poetry and stuff, and so it didn't feel like poverty.

He may have fond memories of his early life,

but everything changed for Ron when he was just eight years old.

One day, out of the blue,

I went with my mum from school

to some nearby relatives,

and while we were at the relatives,

my mum stated that she had left her purse back home,

and she'd be drifting off to get it, and sadly,

she went away and didn't come back.

There was a short period of time where I thought maybe my mum

was going to return to the relatives'.

Soon it became obvious that she wasn't coming back,

and for me, it was devastating.

I thought the world of my mum.

It was only me and her.

We were a little team, and suddenly she'd gone.

And I was absolutely devastated.

Ron was only with his relatives for a short time

before being uprooted once again.

I was taken away by some guys from social services

and taken to a completely new life.

We went to a place outside the city

where I was brought up with my now new brother, Steve,

and whilst I can't hide the fact that it is very sad

to lose one aspect of your life,

I then sort of entered another one,

and was being brought up with my brother.

Ronnie turned up as a young boy,

round about the same age as myself at the time.

My parents said that Ronnie was joining us, that he had issues

with his family, and he'd be staying with us for a short period of time.

Ron lived happily with his foster parents

and his foster brother Steve for many years.

I'd given up on anything relating to my previous family,

so I at that point simply accepted

that I was a guy with a foster brother going through life.

And that was it.

It was only when he got married

that Ron started to miss his birth family.

My wife had a huge family, and I had Steve, my foster brother.

So we had to cater for that by having a very, very small

daytime wedding, because of course,

I had sort of one relative at the time that I could bring along.

With his focus now on married life and children,

it was in fact another two decades

before Ron started his hunt for his family.

He started his search at grassroots level, at his local library.

Roger Hull is one of the senior archivists.

This is the main centre to come for family history

in the Liverpool area, and the wider area as well,

cos a lot of our records cover the whole country.

So there's a huge wealth of resources here.

We have the baptismal, marriage and burial registers

for most of the Liverpool parishes.

We also have the Census returns.

We have a vast collection of local newspapers.

Probably have about 15,000 people who come through this unit

every year looking for their family history.

For Ron, these archives were the perfect place

to try and find out more about his troubled childhood

and discover what became of the mother who abandoned him.

The library were a great help, actually, because what they did,

they give me an address and a phone number

of a particular social services department,

and I wrote to them,

and they were able to send me information about my mother.

And there was some very sad news.

Ron remembers very clearly the moment

when he was told about his mother's death as a child.

I was an 11-year-old kid.

I'd come home from school. Normal day,

brought home some woodwork that I was proudly showing off.

But when I arrived home, my social services visitor

was waiting for me - Mr Wilson -

and I could tell straight away that something was wrong.

And he informed me that my mother had died.

It was devastating. I was very, very sad - I was just a kid.

After nearly 50 years of uncertainty,

this letter from social services would finally allow Ron

to know how his beloved mother had really died.

On the 12th March 1969, she was found dead.

And suicide is indicated on the file,

but no official confirmation is given.

As well as revealing the tragic circumstances of his mother's death,

this letter held some other big surprises for Ron.

It told me that I had siblings - a girl born in 1939,

a boy two years later,

and twins who are half Chinese,

whose ages were not given.

And it says there are no details about these children on the file.

This came as a shock and an amazing surprise.

It was like this fantastic bonus,

that because I'd done the work to find out about my mum,

all this information came my way about my siblings.

But of course, it was only the start,

because who where they and where were they?

There was obviously some work to be done.

Ron started the search for his siblings

with the one key bit of information the letter contained -

the date of birth of his sister.

But all he had to go on was the name Georgina,

which he'd overheard his foster parents mention once.

But the search for this name

didn't deliver any results with that date of birth,

so Ron tried searching again under an abbreviation of it.

We got through all that and found it wasn't actually Georgina,

it was Jean. It was then a question, really,

of finding, potentially, the year that she may have married,

because my guess was that being a young lady, she would have married,

and we're not going to find her until we have her married surname.

Ron had to forensically look through every single marriage record

in the Liverpool area over a period of almost ten years.

It was a huge undertaking.

But finally, it paid off.

There we go. Found it there.

We've got Jean Clark,

and she's married a guy with the surname Ray,

Liverpool South, and the entry is 10D867.

This Jean Ray had the maiden name Clark,

which is also Ron's surname. And her date of birth matched too.

Her marriage certificate revealed another vital bit of information -

a mother listed as Elizabeth Clark, which was Ron's mother's name.

So more detective work helped Ron find a possible address

for the Jean who he hoped was his older sister.

And so he wasted no time and drove round there.

I was filled with all sort of mixed emotions, because...

I had real butterflies.

I knew that what happened next could be a life-changing event for me,

and I knew if I could clarify that this was actually

Jean and Alan's home, I would be about to meet my sister.

And it was life-changing.

And so it was on Christmas Eve, 1998,

that Ron's life was to change forever.

I was 60 when I met Ron.

Hi, Jeanie.

At the time, it was a total shock for Jean, who, like Ron,

had grown up thinking she had no other family.

The only time I knew about Ron was when he found me.

It was good, you know, knowing that I did have someone,

because all them years on, I didn't have anyone.

No relatives, you know?

You said to my husband,

"Is your wife's birthday the 24th of the 4th '39?"

-That's right.

-And Alan said, "Yes."

-Yeah.

And he said, "You'd better come in."

Yeah, because I'll never forget the moment I said,

-"So would you mind if I say hello to my sister?"

-Yeah.

-And he just looked at me...

-I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

-It was emotional, but it was a lovely occasion.

-Yeah, it was.

-Thank you for that.

-Ah, you're welcome.

-Thank you very much.

I just wish it had been a bit...

-Sooner.

-Sooner than that, yeah. And aren't we alike?

-We are.

-Poor you! HE LAUGHS

-I think it's lovely, Ron. I do.

-Ah.

But yeah, I suppose we are alike, aren't we?

-And says we laugh the same.

-And we like the same -

we like the Eagles and you like the Eagles.

-There you go.

-Strange, isn't it?

-Yeah.

Through finding Jean,

Ron also made contact with another sibling, Roy.

That's me, you, and there's our Roy.

Sadly, Roy's no longer with us, of course,

but because of you I did get to see him

-and I did get to meet him and spent time there.

-Yes.

So that again was the same experience all over again

of meeting a sibling that, you know, I'd never known previously.

-So another lovely experience.

-Yeah.

But Ron's search for his new family didn't end there.

A letter Ron was given by social services

explaining his mother's death had also referenced

two mysterious twin siblings who were half Chinese.

Finding Jean now inspired Ron to launch a new search for them.

After a local newspaper wrote an article

about him and Jean, a cousin got in touch

with a vital piece of information about the twins.

They gave me that little clue that we didn't have,

which was that surname, which led to the name Yong.

And because by now we were used to doing a bit of detective work,

we were able to trace their births.

And that was the start of the adventure of actually finding them.

It was a bit daunting to think

that it was time to start searching all over again,

because I did realise that it takes up a lot of time.

But at the end of the adventure, finding Jean,

it was so rewarding, and I wouldn't change a thing.

This time around, Ron could use all the family finding resources

the internet has to offer, so he went straight to website

that allows anyone to browse through a range of family records.

Once I had the name Yong, it was a sort of eureka moment,

because the name is obviously nothing like as widely known

as the name Clark would be.

And searching for that name, I was able, actually, to find

a birth registration for somebody, and it was listed as "Yong or Clark"

so I knew absolutely that I'd found their names.

It was an incredible moment.

There he is. So we know we've got Raymond F Clark,

mother's maiden name Yong or Clark, for whatever reason at the time,

but it helped me no end, because that proved to me

that this is the guy, unquestionably.

I've now got his birth date as well as being between

January and March 1952, so we've got an age.

Armed with this information, Ron trawled the social networking sites

and found a photograph that someone had posted of a wedding in Bali.

Yeah, there it is. That's the photo that I found

when I could identify for the first time ever

the guy that I thought was Raymond, my brother.

And I just immediately felt a sort of bond -

that, "There he is, that's my brother." I knew.

He had a strong lead, but now Ron had to find a way

of getting in touch with this Raymond Clark.

If, like Ron, you fancy searching for your family by yourself,

then birth, death and marriage certificates

are a great starting point.

Cross-referencing these records will allow you to discover

if families have moved address

or if people have changed their last names.

And signatories on these documents often lead

to other relatives or next of kin.

Until the 1990s, the only way of accessing these documents

was by going to the national or local registry offices

and trawling through their archives on microfiche.

But in recent years, these certificates

have been collated into searchable databases,

which are available on various genealogy websites.

In Lincolnshire, 80-year-old Violet Rossini is on her way

to meet her beloved sister Kathleen.

They were separated when Violet was aged eight,

and haven't seen each other for 72 years.

Are you excited?

Yes. Yes, excited.

But also nervous.

After taking on their case,

the Salvation Army found Kathleen in a nursing home in Lincoln,

where she is waiting with her daughter Sharon

for this transcontinental reunion.

-Does it feel unreal?

-It does, actually.

Yeah, bit surreal.

Just want to hold her.

-Your heart going?

-Yeah.

-Yeah. Blood pressure going up!

-SHE LAUGHS

Oh!

Hello.

THEY MURMUR INDISTINCTLY

-72 years.

-But I've thought of you all the time.

Have you? So have I. So have I.

-How have you felt?

-Oh, waiting, waiting just now.

But it's been worth every minute.

-It has, hasn't it?

-Yes.

-But we're here now.

-Yeah. And we'll keep in touch.

-Yes.

-Don't know where to begin, do we?

-No, but we will eventually.

-Never forgotten.

-Neither have I. There's been that bond.

A very strong bond.

-What's her name, did you say? I forgot.

-Candy.

-Candy?

-Yeah.

-I had a little dog called that.

-I knew that was coming!

THEY LAUGH I think she's better than a dog!

Auntie Violet has travelled across,

what, half the world to get here at her age. I'm astounded.

Respect to the lady.

She's found a missing piece of her life.

I think as much as she says that she is happy and, you know,

bubbly - she is all of that, but now it's that one notch higher.

She's found someone that knows the stories that she remembers

and can confirm that they're true.

-I had a little dog called Penny.

-Oh, did you?

-Yeah.

-He was a cheap one, then?

-Very cheap!

THEY LAUGH

You've got the same old cracks, haven't you?

They are so alike,

and immediately the sense of humour came out,

and it was the same.

I've never seen her cry, so the fact that she broke down -

it's like, you knew she was coming home.

She's come to someone that she recognises and has a bond with

and is someone that's so familiar without knowing her for 72 years.

It's amazing that that's the reaction that they had.

Can you remember giving me a piggyback up the hill

-when we were going to school?

-Oh, yes.

-And we kept it secret.

-Yes.

-We used to meet in secret.

-Yes, I did.

The ultimate revenge for my mum, meeting Violet again,

on the people who dragged them apart,

is they're now together again.

I lived round the corner, and my foster mother didn't want me

to have anything to do with Kathleen when she found out we were related.

-How awful's that, though?

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

-And so we used to...

-Meet in secret?

-Yeah.

They should have known each other their whole lives,

and now they get to make up for that.

I don't believe that!

Thrilled to bits.

She was what I expected.

I've been waiting for her and loved her for all this time.

I was shocked to see how much we do look alike.

And it was after that, everything just blew away.

You know, it's, "Oh, yes, this is Kathleen," you know?

Awesome, awesome.

It is really nice to have to have my sister back, because,

well, she's meant a lot to me all these years.

I've never forgotten her and I've always thought about her.

So I am glad to have a sister back again.

It doesn't feel like 72 years at all since we last met.

A lot of things that I've felt,

Kathleen's been able to put into place,

and I've got that sense of feeling

that what I thought is right,

and I wasn't just imagining it.

And she's just closed everything up for me.

That's my youngest daughter.

It's like a miracle.

I can't really describe it any other way,

because I never really thought I would ever see her.

I thought if I found her she might have passed away,

because she was older than me, and I'm getting on to.

But now this is just really wonderful.

In London the next day,

Violet and Candace pop by the Salvation Army Family Finders office

to meet the team who helped them trace Kathleen.

Good morning, everybody.

I just want to say thank you for the wonderful,

wonderful job that you've done, and for all the hard work.

I'm very grateful and always will be. Thank you very much.

Thank you once again.

As a caseworker, you don't often think of the impact

that what you're doing will have on somebody

until you get that phone call and you can hear it in their voice,

that they're so excited to be in contact with that person,

so it's thrilling to be able to be part of that excitement

and that reuniting of family members.

In Liverpool, Ron Clark thought he was on his own

from the age of eight, but when he was in his '40s,

Ron started searching for his siblings,

and found four brothers and sisters he'd never known.

That's me, you, and there's our Roy.

He'd found his older sister, Jean, and a brother, Roy,

but next, Ron was on the hunt for the half Chinese twins

who are also his siblings.

The difference between finding Jean

and dealing with finding the twins

was I could use some more modern technology,

some newer methods.

When Ron started trawling through social network sites,

he came across an image that changed everything.

But it turned out Ray was on the other side of the world,

in Bali, Indonesia.

Ron found an e-mail for the hotel which Ray manages there

and sent him a letter.

"Dear Raymond, I have something important to discuss with you.

"Will you contact me?"

With a telephone number

I recognised as being a Liverpool telephone number,

signed Ron Clark.

Speechless.

Sat in my office and took a deep breath, I thought,

"Oh, my God, what's this?"

Then I sort of calmed down a little bit, and I'm thinking,

"Hmmm, relative."

Somebody's found us.

Cos I didn't know about Ron.

Nobody told me about Ron.

Didn't know he existed.

So then when I called him, the minute he spoke,

the minute I spoke - automated connection.

It's like we knew each other already.

Just chatted and chatted and chatted.

And then I told him,

"OK, next time I come to the UK we'll get together."

And the next time I got to the UK, we had the weekend together.

Fantastic.

Super nice. Yeah.

Ray always thought he and his twin sister Irene

were completely on their own with no immediate family.

I'm so proud of what he's done.

-Yeah, fantastic.

-And he's found us in the end.

-And he's helped us belong to someone at last.

-Take my hat off to him.

Yeah, absolutely.

They've all met up before, but now Ray's come over from Bali

and Irene's come from her home in Wigan for another family gathering.

And the first port of call is big sister Jean's house.

-Hi!

-Hello!

-My little sister.

-How are you?

-Jean, look what I found.

-How are you?

-Little bit better now, thank you.

Hiya. I heard you haven't been very well.

-I'm all right now, seeing you.

-Ahhh.

-THEY LAUGH

-Nice to see you again.

-Thank you.

-Everything go OK?

-Yes, thank you.

-Good girl.

-Lovely.

-It is lovely, isn't it?

-What a nice little house you've got here!

-Eh?

-Nice little house you got here.

-Lovely little bungalow.

-Yeah.

-I like it, me. It's lovely. Cosy. Dead cosy.

Connecting with Ron has been an amazing experience for Ray

and Irene, but they still have a lot of questions for him

about their mother.

As far as we know, our mother is listed as deserting us

at three months.

No physical memories.

Unlike Ron - Ron's got eight years he lived with her. Great memories.

So some of the things he tells me, I'm all ears.

Listening, listening, you know? Cos we didn't have that privilege.

-Is very interesting, though, isn't it? When he's telling us.

-Yeah.

While they're in Liverpool, Ron takes them both

to the very same area where he grew up with their mum in the 1950s.

How long did you actually live there with Mum?

Six, seven years of my life was spent here in Kent Gardens.

-We didn't get that privilege, so we don't know.

-No.

-But this one is an actual photo...

-Of the apartment?

-Yeah.

But you don't call it apartment, you call it a tenement.

Well, yeah, I mean, they were referred to -

the Scouse term was "tennies".

The tennies. So we'd say we live in the tennies of Kent Gardens.

Built in 1938, Kent Gardens was part

of a £20 million redevelopment scheme across Liverpool,

which was designed to replace the overcrowded

and unsanitary slums across the city.

Kent Gardens itself was demolished in the 1970s,

but at the time of its construction,

tenement blocks like this were considered highly progressive.

So they were brand-new as the time, and they were probably much better

than the housing that people had lived in before.

Obviously had running water, sanitation,

indoor lavatories and baths, whereas the old buildings might not have had that.

Probably have been a luxury for the people who moved into them,

from what has happened before.

But while these new blocks did provide safe,

sanitary housing for former slum dwellers,

this was still high density living,

with many large extended families crammed into small flats.

It probably would have been a hard life for them, but you tend to find

there's a great community atmosphere in these tenements.

Some fell by the wayside, but others were indomitable,

and that's this Liverpool spirit, isn't it?

This indomitable spirit which saw them through the Blitz in the 1940s,

and it's the Scouser as we know today.

In a close-knit community like this, being a single parent

would undoubtedly have carried a certain stigma

for Ron's mother, Elizabeth, and this may ultimately have contributed

to her children ending up in care.

Because of the social ethos, the morality of the time,

which frowned on such things -

that marriage was sacrosanct

and to have a child out of wedlock was, you know,

frowned upon, to put it mildly.

And although Kent Gardens was close to Chinatown and the docks,

having mixed race children out of wedlock here

would have made life even tougher.

-Looks quite grim, doesn't it?

-It does.

-In one way,

-but it's a community.

-It is.

-This was Liverpool in the '50s and the '60s.

-It was.

-It wasn't an unhappy place.

-No.

At the time, most of the people in this area were poor,

but of course our mum, single parent, poorer than most.

And yet, you know, she managed with no resources whatsoever

to make my life as happy as possible at things like Christmas time.

All my memories of living there are very happy ones.

It's quite ghostly, cos this is the very first time

-I'm hearing this address.

-Yes.

This area feels so familiar to me, because although there are buildings

that have modernised and changed,

the basic layout of the area is the same,

and you know, I recognise, I'm familiar with it,

cos I used to go to school down the road.

During the time you were still living there,

I'm actually just starting to go to college.

-College, just up the road.

-Which is walking distance away.

-I wish I'd known a bit more about this earlier on.

-Of course.

-Walking down the road, could have gone knocking on the door.

-Yeah.

-Would've been good, that, wouldn't it?

-"Can I have a cup of tea?"

-THEY LAUGH

-There, see? That's how close we were.

-Absolutely.

-So close and so far away.

-That's right.

-Yeah.

-Great stuff, man.

-Thank you.

I think life was pretty desperate.

I mean, this was post-war years -

money was short.

Maybe there was bread on the table some days, not every day.

He tends to gloss over a little bit,

cos they were happy days for him,

and I'm sure they were really, really happy days,

but I think during those happy days,

and he didn't know anything different, things were tight.

And I think that was poverty in reality.

I wish I could have been there with my mum.

Not sure I'd like to be there

enduring those same circumstances, though.

Ron's tireless search for his family

has brought him together with his siblings Ray, Irene and Jean.

But while Ray's here in the UK, Ron would like the twins to meet someone

who's equally important to him - his foster brother Steve,

who he grew up with from the age of eight.

I've never met Irene or Ray. This is the very first time.

I'm really looking forward to it, I'm sure we'll get on great,

hopefully, and I hope to see a lot more of them as well.

You know, it's good for me.

I'm a little bit nervous, because we've never met.

-Cheers.

-Cheers, Ron.

Hey, hey!

I don't even need to be introduced.

-Is that OK?

-Cos I'm sure...

-Hiya. Come here. I've got you first.

-Hiya!

Hiya. How are you?

-Ray.

-Very pleased to meet you.

-Very, very pleased to meet you.

-Yeah.

-You're here now.

-Thank you.

-We've met.

-Yeah, we've met a few times.

THEY LAUGH

I thought through my whole childhood, adulthood,

that the only relative I had was my twin sister Irene.

There was nobody else. And all of a sudden

I've got this new-found family - massive!

-It's gone from like a small finding to massive.

-Massive.

You know, when Ronnie rings me and says to me,

"I've found somebody else now." And it's networking, isn't it, really?

-It's networking in effect.

-Yeah.

Because oh, you know, you've got a cousin here

or a second cousin there or an aunt here or an uncle there.

And they're not just in Liverpool any more.

-No, they're all over the world.

-And I was in Australia two weeks ago,

and then he was telling me, "Oh, we've got relations in Brisbane!"

And I said, "I was there last week!"

So I have a family. And I've been brought up all these years

thinking I didn't have a family.

So now I'm a family man.

Yeah, so it's quite exciting.

Well, it went superbly well, didn't it?

As much as it may be true to say that my mum's not here

to see these things, this is the next best thing.

We've created a situation that she would be very, very proud of.

I just know that she would. And for me that's everything.

Since filming the programme, Kathleen has passed away,

but not before having the opportunity to catch up

on a lifetime of happy memories with her beloved sister Violet.