Episode 5 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 Catherine 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 was it you last had contact with him?

-..and dedicated one-man bands...

I like to do 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, I couldn't stop crying.

-It's a proud moment for Dad.

-It was the start of finding my family.

There are a wealth of agencies all over the UK that can help

reunite estranged families.

I don't just look for dead people,

I also look for live people, trying

to reunite relatives or friends who have lost contact with each other.

But not everyone chooses to call in the experts -

plenty of people decide to turn family finder themselves.

Nowadays, you sit down at your computer, go onto the screen,

click the mouse and hopefully,

the computer will do the searching for you.

And that's exactly what 40-year-old Tracy has decided to do

on behalf of her father, George Chapman.

It was about eight months searching through all the files

until we actually found what we thought

was a family member.

Throughout his tough upbringing in 1940s Northumberland, George

believed he was an only child.

Well, I was born in 1946 and moved to a place called Hartford Huts,

which belong to the council now, but they were Nissen huts, you know?

Had no toilets or anything, you had to walk a quarter of a mile

if you wanted your toilet! And, er...

Were there till I was nearly four year old.

The council had built a new estate at Bedlington Station

and that's when we all moved on to Bedlington Station.

I had a couple of paper rounds, to make a big pot of money

and used to come back in the morning and do my mam's breakfast

because she'd turned blind, you know? She couldn't cook.

Then away to school, come back at dinner time.

Do a little sandwich or something for her, you know,

because she was diabetic, so she had to have food.

Many a time I came in and she was in what we call a diabetic coma.

I had to try and get her out of it with plenty of sweet tea.

My dad contracted TB and he was ill with that,

so I had two ill parents for a long time.

I hadn't any help from social services at all

and I still had to go to school, but I coped, you know.

With so many responsibilities at home,

George was encouraged to go on a school trip when he was 15.

My dad said, "Oh, get away - you need a break" and that, you know.

My mother was in hospital at this time,

she'd been took in two days before I went, but they told us to still go.

So I went away and everything was all right and...

A week later, I got a letter saying my mother had died.

And she had been buried.

And nobody had informed us, you know, till then.

My dad and me

just had to get on with our two selves

until I started going out with Maureen.

George and Maureen became engaged and got married not long after.

Then, a few years later, George's dad also passed away.

I was 22 when my dad died

and I was going through a lot of papers,

you know, clear the house of your dad's stuff and that.

Stuffed away in a little wallet, hidden away,

was this adoption certificate,

which I had never seen.

So I looked at it and...

Couldn't believe what I saw and I'm shocked.

You know, nobody telling me this, you know?

George had lived for 22 years thinking that the people who

brought him up were his birth parents.

Naturally, he wanted to know more about his background,

so he asked his relations for any information they had.

They were all sworn to secrecy.

I asked my Auntie Ruthie and she says, "Just leave well alone

"and just get on with your life and forget about it", you know?

Which I said I couldn't, now. Now that I've found out that...

..I'm adopted.

My mother might be alive, you know?

But they wouldn't tell us anything. They wouldn't say a word, you know.

But George wouldn't give up and eventually his relatives

agreed to tell him his birth mother's name, but nothing more.

Putting it all to the back of his mind,

George went on to have a family of his own with wife Maureen.

The family kept asking me, "Are you going to pick this up?"

and things like that and I says, "No, just let it be."

I felt ashamed.

Because I was adopted. The stigma of being adopted, you weren't wanted.

Pushed out to somebody else, you know?

It was this sense of stigma that George's daughter Tracy

struggled with the most.

I felt upset about the way

HE felt about it, because to me,

obviously, things had changed by this point with adoption

and things like that and I didn't think that there was a stigma

to it and that he shouldn't feel ashamed or anything like that.

He should just...

you know, want to look and find out where he had came from

and where his real family were.

I always used to ring my mum and say I wish my dad would do it.

She'd always say, "Well, we'll try, we'll keep pushing him

"to see if he will."

I think we'd managed to talk him round to allowing us

to make the first steps to look for his family.

George finally felt it was OK

to show Tracy his adoption certificate.

-This is how it started, I found this.

-Yeah.

And I couldn't believe it when I saw the date that I'd been adopted,

what with me being born on 4 May.

It's...

The whole thing was completed in 1946 on 31 May.

-That's it.

-Yes.

Armed with her dad's adoption papers, Tracy approached

Northumberland Social Services, who gave her his birth certificate.

This crucial document gave them

confirmation of George's original name.

They gave you the name of your mam,

who was Purdy, formerly Foster,

which was her maiden name.

With this vital information, the next part of the search could begin.

We went on a site on the internet and you could search through births,

deaths, marriages. There was a census on there as well.

If, like George and Tracy,

you fancy searching for a UK birth, marriage or death certificate

online, there are various resources available.

You can find indexes of the registration of a birth, marriage

or death from 1837 to the present day

for free on the web database.

Or there are a number of subscription genealogy

websites for which membership fees can be as little as £20 a year.

By tracking down George's birth certificate,

Tracy's research had opened up a wealth of possible leads.

We searched through the births first.

My dad's original birth listing was on there.

A lot of the information was hard to find because we didn't know

that my dad's birth mother's name had changed with her being married.

I looked under the marriages from Mary Purdy

and it came up saying that she had been married to George Clough.

So then we put in Clough...

..in the next ten years and it brought up Christine, Vera and Alan.

Christine, Vera and Alan

were also children of George's birth mother, Mary.

At the very least, they were half siblings to George

and possibly even full siblings and armed with these names,

Tracy turned her attention to social media.

Me and my niece Rebecca, we had the list of names, and she contacted me

and says, "Why don't you search through the social media site

"and see if you can see if anybody is on there?"

And when Tracy entered the name of George's brother, Alan Clough,

she seemed to strike gold.

I said straightaway that he looked like my dad. I could see...

The bit from the eyes...

The nose and the eyes, I thought they looked very similar,

so pretty much thought we'd hit on...

-The right person.

-The right person.

Tracy sent this Alan a message asking if he might be a relative.

But they received no reply.

I just thought, "Oh, they don't want to know, they've rejected it and..."

But we knew that they hadn't read it.

But Tracy kept saying, "Well, nobody's read it."

They hadn't read it, so it hadn't been rejected, you know?

George's search had hit a dead end.

Little did they know what was just around the corner.

Since the early 1960s, Britain's divorce rate has risen by 80%.

And with families splitting up,

many children get separated from one of their parents.

That's what happened to Rebecca Taylor, who enlisted the help

of the Salvation Army to try and track down her biological father.

OK, can I just take her name, sorry?

More often than not,

people can't provide the information that would be ideal.

We can still work with quite basic information.

Rebecca's story begins in the Black Country in 1976.

I was born in Walsall in the West Midlands.

My mum was from Walsall and my dad was from Walsall and I grew up there.

Rebecca has a few precious early memories of her father Trevor.

I remember seeing my dad when I was very little.

I also remember him teaching me to ride a bike.

At the age of three, her parents split up,

but Rebecca continued to see her dad.

I used to see him every now and again.

I remember he took me to a teddy bear's picnic in the park.

We went to Alton Towers and he didn't live with us, but I got to see him.

However, when Rebecca was ten, her mother remarried

and the new family decided to start a fresh life in Devon.

We moved from a semidetached house in Smethwick, which is not the nicest

part of the world, but that's where we lived, and we moved down south.

And that was the last time Rebecca saw her dad.

I stopped seeing my dad when we moved away,

so my dad was quite keen to see me,

but then my mum remarried again

and they had my sister when I was ten years old.

It may have been a fresh start for her parents,

but Rebecca struggled to adapt to life without her father.

I actually always wanted my dad, not my stepdad. Um...

You know, it was quite difficult, especially at that age, being ten,

just on the cusp of becoming a teenager...

You know, teenage hormones and everything.

I don't think I was always the easiest teenager, to be fair.

Leaving her father behind hit Rebecca hard.

I used to get quite emotional,

quite upset that I didn't know where my dad was.

And yearly celebrations only made things worse.

I always remembered my dad was there, he was never forgotten.

I always remembered him, especially at poignant times, family occasions

like birthdays, Fathers' Day, Christmas, things like that.

You know, you want your family there - that's the family times,

so I really missed him then. I really wanted to have him around.

Even though she grew up far away from her biological father

and had just a few blurry photos of him,

Rebecca was always determined to track him down.

I always said to myself, "I'm going to find my dad one day.

"I'm going to do it."

It wasn't until Rebecca was in her 20s that she first decided to

-take up the search.

-For years, I'd wondered where he was.

It was quite heart-wrenching in a way,

because you don't really know where to begin.

She started with the phonebook.

I thought, you know, I'm going to ring up people with the same name

who live in that area, just on the off-chance it might be him.

So I'd pick up the phone...

And say, "Hi, I believe you may be my dad because you've got the same

"name and you live in the area - did you have a daughter called Rebecca?"

In desperation,

she called no fewer than 17 people with the name Trevor Matthews.

"No, sorry, love. Really sorry, but I'm not your dad."

That was quite disheartening.

I realised that probably going through the phone book wasn't

going to find my dad.

Disheartened and demoralised,

these early setbacks knocked Rebecca's confidence.

She gave up on her initial search, but she never gave up hope.

I knew that he was there somewhere, wondering, "Where's Rebecca,

"what's she doing?"

Ten years later, Rebecca decided to start looking for her dad again,

this time, with an awareness of the search capabilities of the internet.

I'd started doing searching for birth certificates,

death certificates, because I didn't know if my dad was still alive

and I was kind of grasping at straws a bit.

She may not have had much to work with,

but all the advances in technology meant Rebecca's searches

were far more focused this time around.

I put in my dad's name, where he was born,

and birthday, and I came across an amazing story.

Rebecca found an article relating to a Trevor Matthews.

"To our brother on 20 February, have a great day, love you,

-"from sisters and families and Auntie Peggy."

-But with no knowledge of

this Auntie Peggy, Rebecca couldn't

be certain if she had the right man.

When I opened the page up, there's a photograph of him and I thought,

ah, that's quite eerie, because that actually does look like my dad

from what I can remember when I was nine, ten years old.

And ultimately, it was the photo that convinced Rebecca

she MUST have the right man.

I saw that and thought, "Wow, I actually think this is my dad."

With a photo, date of birth and location,

Rebecca would have had a fighting chance of finding Trevor by herself.

But nervous about making first contact,

she decided to place the search in the hands of the experts.

I was in the car with my mum and stepdad and I said,

"I really want to find my dad, but I just don't know how to get that contact in place".

And my stepdad said, "Have you tried the Salvation Army?"

The Salvation Army have a high rate of success

when it comes to reuniting families.

Rebecca had made a good start, but she couldn't be entirely

sure that the man she'd found was her father.

Could the Family Tracing Unit solve the case and find their man?

She contacted us

in the first place by filling in one of our online enquiry forms.

She provided us with her father's full name, date of birth

and the last known area he was possibly known to be in.

Rebecca was also able to send us a copy of her birth certificate,

her parents' marriage certificate, which was able to help us

with our searches.

They had some basic information, but the Salvation Army now needed

to track down Trevor Matthews' current whereabouts and then

write to him, asking if he would like to reconnect with his daughter.

And while this all took place, all Rebecca could do was wait.

In Tyne and Wear, ten months had passed since George

and his daughter Tracy sent a message on social media to the

man they thought to be his brother Alan.

Understandably, they'd given up hope.

But a mere ten miles away, his prayers had just been answered.

I didn't go on for over a year

and on 27 December,

for some reason, I decided to go on

and I realised I had a message

and when I opened the message,

it was from a Tracy Stephenson.

She said her father had been doing his family tree and his mother

was called Mary Purdy, nee Foster,

who then married George Clough.

And asked if I was a relative.

When I seen this, I thought, "God, I don't believe this".

Because Mary and George were my mother and father.

So I replied to Tracy's message telling her who I was

and I gave the telephone number out...

..and George phoned me a couple of days later.

I picked the number up and walked around the bedroom and Maureen

says, "We're all going out of the way so you can be on your own upstairs.

"You can talk to him and see what happens."

And that was the most fantastic thing that had ever happened.

I phoned up, I was shaking, I was phoning up,

and funnily enough,

the first words out of his mouth was, "Is that George?"

But he says, "I've been sitting here waiting all morning,

"hoping that you would phone us."

And... Oh, I think we spoke for about an hour.

I wept, you know, that I'd found some family.

After 68 years!

Knowing that you've got a brother and sisters,

it's the best feeling in the world. You know?

It felt great.

You know, to know that I had a brother.

And like I said, it just felt... as though I knew him for years.

Alan and Christine grew up locally in the same time period as George.

Their life was fairly typical for the place and for the time.

I left school in 1966 and I went to work in the mines. Er...

Which was just up the road in Backworth.

But the music, everything was just great.

That was my recollection of the '60s.

Alan and Christine had a loving but tough upbringing with their mum who

raised them by herself after their father died when Alan was just 11.

Their mother kept George a secret from both of them all her life.

I was 21 when she died

and she never mentioned anything whatsoever.

I just couldn't take it in.

I just thought my mam's not me mam, not the person I knew.

It was just a shock at first for me.

Alan came down New Year's Day, specifically to make me

talk to him and I never regretted it from the day I did.

It's Christine's birthday today and George and his new

siblings are all coming together for a proper knees up tonight.

But there's another big event today, too.

Alan and Christine had a sister, Vera, who died in her 20s.

But there's also ANOTHER sister, Thelma,

who now lives in Australia and today, Thelma has come all

the way over to Northumberland to celebrate Christine's birthday

and to meet George, the brother she never knew she had.

When Christine rang to say we had a brother,

I was so confused.

Which...? Who is he?

But when I seen the picture of him, it was the image of Christine.

Get very excited when I see them, yeah. I'm...

I'm usually very calm,

but when I come to see the family,

I do get a bit excited about it, you know?

Just because I've never had anything like this,

I've been an only one, you know?

I've always seen a lot of...families,

you know, when they're all together, and...

And I've often said I wouldn't mind having a family, a brother

and sisters... To share, you know, I think it would be lovely.

And it's happened, I've got brothers and sisters.

It's the best feeling in the world. I love it.

George has met Alan and Christine already,

but this is the first time he'll get to know Thelma.

-Hello!

-Hello, Christine.

-You all right?

-That's another one.

After a tough childhood caring for sick parents

and believing he was an only child...

What are you doing? Hello, Alan...

..George now has not just a brother and sister who live ten miles away,

but also another sister from the other side of the world.

-At long last!

-At long last!

-My brother, George.

-It's a long flight, isn't it? 23, is it?

-24.

And then the rest and hanging around the airport...

Yeah, I think that's the worst part.

-But it was worth it.

-It was worth it.

-Very well worth it.

-I'm pleased you've come over.

-So am I.

-I've been looking forward to this for a long time.

-I have, too.

-Now I've got a new family!

-That's right!

-Yeah.

-It's lovely.

When you think we grew up just...

-What, ten miles apart?

-Ten miles apart, yeah.

Not knowing that the other one existed.

We could have bumped into each other.

-We used to go to the coffee shop, the toy shop.

-The toy shop!

We could have bumped into each other there.

We would never have known.

Just wish that I had met my mother,

you know, before she died, you know.

She was young when she died.

-That's me mam.

-That's your mam, yes.

-That's Alan, when he was little.

-She was great, great sense of humour.

She was strict, very strict. Very strict, but fair.

Shame it's taken all these years to find each other.

-But we'll make up for it now.

-Oh, yes!

-The best we can.

We were shocked and then happy and then saddened

-because it's taken all this time.

-Taken all this time, that's it.

But it's great.

It's the best thing that's ever happened to me.

I've always said I wanted brothers and sisters.

And I got what I asked for - can I ask for any more?

In Berkshire, Rebecca had contacted the Salvation Army to help

find her father Trevor after over 30 years apart.

The Family Tracing Unit had made some inroads,

but Rebecca had heard nothing.

The best place to start, with a case like this one,

with the information we were provided with, is the electoral roll.

I was able to cross reference the details which meant

I was able to narrow it down to possibly the right person.

After an agonising wait, the Salvation Army had come up trumps.

They were able to confirm that the man Rebecca had found online

was her father, Trevor Matthews, and they were also able to

confirm that he was happy to reconnect with her.

I got a phone call, two weeks after, roughly.

I thought to myself, this is going to be an emotional moment,

so I went into a meeting room, shut myself in there. She said,

"I've got some fantastic news for you.

"I'm really pleased to tell you that we've found your dad and

"he's over the moon that you've taken the effort and found...

"That he's in touch with you now".

I was in floods of tears,

I was just so happy, emotional tears,

after all these years, I'd actually finally found him

and he wanted me to find him.

Naturally, Rebecca wasn't the only one

the Salvation Army had got in touch with.

When I received the letter,

saying one of my family would like to contact me, um...

Well, my mind was doing overtime.

They left a contact number and I phoned the Salvation Army

and they told me it was my daughter Rebecca.

And she'd like to meet up with me.

I phoned Rebecca and I heard a voice and I thought, I'll be glad

when I can meet you, you know? Really pleased to meet you.

And I just want to meet you.

I was like, "Oh, it's my dad, it's my dad!"

So that was quite a good moment, when I actually got to speak to him.

I still recognised the accent, and I felt emotional...

Happy emotional.

He kept saying to me, "I can't actually believe this, I keep having to pinch myself.

"I can't believe this is actually happening",

because he didn't think he would actually ever see me again.

Rebecca and Trevor were separated for 30 years.

There's been a lot of water under the bridge

and Trevor has only recently been able to share his version of events.

The reason we split up is because we was different to one another.

Different, chalk and cheese, you know?

I had a different lifestyle, she had a different lifestyle.

So what we done, we split, to live our own lifestyles.

During the recession of the early '80s, divorce rates hit their peak.

Rebecca's mother and Trevor became part of the statistics.

Rebecca was about ten, I think, something like that.

Nine or ten, anyway.

And, um...

After that, I never saw her for, well...

..30 years.

Yeah. And, um...

It was so sad.

Because I didn't want to leave Rebecca behind or anybody else.

But you know, due to circumstances beyond my control,

I decided to cut.

And that's what I'll always do.

I don't know if that's any good, but...

that's about the truth of it, you know?

Back in contact, the pair are hoping they can make up for lost time.

And that's exactly what they did when they first met.

I went there for the weekend.

I was supposed to see him on the Saturday and he was

so keen to see me that he phoned me up and said,

"I think you should come and meet us tonight. Why wait?"

I said, "I'm not ready for this yet!

"This is such a big thing, I'm not ready, let's just do it tomorrow."

You know, seize the day and all that - just do it now.

He's asking to see you.

So we got ready and we went and met him at his local pub, got the taxi

and the taxi pulled up and he was waiting outside the pub already.

I was like, "I think that's my dad, I think that's him. There he is!

"But is it him?" So we got out of the taxi

and he said, "All right, Rebecca?"

He was really over the moon

and it was really good to speak to him again.

As for Trevor, he's just pleased to get a second chance.

I'll put back, you know, what I've missed out on. Yeah.

I'll do my best to do it. Because I'm determined.

And I'm glad to be back. As Arnold Schwarzenegger said, "I'll be back."

Rebecca and her daughter Holly now live in Berkshire.

Today, they're making the 120-mile journey to Walsall.

Rebecca and Trevor are meeting up somewhere which holds great

significance to him -

the industrial region of the town.

-Hello, Rebecca!

-Hi, Dad.

-Nice to see you.

-And you. How are you?

-Not too bad. And yourself?

-How are you keeping?

-Not too bad, thank you.

It's really good to see you again, Dad.

I can't get to see you often enough, regular enough, really.

I know. It's a shame I don't live near you.

-I know.

-But then, saying that, it's not that far.

This is only the third time they've ever got together

and because of all the years apart,

Rebecca has missed out on knowing a whole other side of her family.

Today, Trevor has brought along some photos of her Black Country

-relatives.

-This was my mother's...

and my dad's 50th anniversary.

So this is all your sisters, then?

-So it's you, your mum and dad and all the five of you?

-The five of us, yes.

That's the first time I've seen them all, apart from you.

-So that's your mum and that's your dad?

-Yeah.

On their golden wedding anniversary?

Me dad, he was a very good footballer,

he had a skilled trade, a brass caster.

-I love photos, but especially old photos.

-That was me gran.

-That's me.

-Cor, you're only about four there.

That's a good photo.

This is me nan,

who worked at Norwich foundry

in Littleton Street.

She worked there 50 years.

-My dad also worked there and I also worked there.

-Not far from here?

Not far from here, about a mile down the road there.

-What type of work would that be?

-That's steel and iron,

castings, grinding, linishing.

We used to come out of our homes clean and then

when you came back from work, in the evening,

you'd be full of dust and dirt,

sand all over you... Um...

Because the conditions were appalling.

Wasn't like health and safety then, was very little existence,

we never knew anything different.

We had to get up and go to work and... Just get on with it.

Trevor's hometown of Walsall is in the Black Country,

which has a strong claim to be the cradle of industry in the UK.

It's widely believed this area got its name

in the 19th century from the pollution created by the local coal

mines and the soot made by the many thousands of ironworking foundries.

Trevor worked in these local iron foundries for years.

It was tough work and it bred a certain type of tough man.

The area's industrial influence peaked at the start

of the 20th century,

but in common with much of the rest of the UK, the Black Country

has suffered from the decline in industry in recent decades.

The last coal mine closed in 1968

while the '70s saw multiple closures of iron foundries.

And by 1980, iron and steel

were being made at a mere handful of plants locally.

Inevitably, this industrial decline led to family

break-ups as husbands lost the only job they'd known all their lives

and sons and daughters moved to other areas to find work.

Trevor's had a tough life, spent working in the foundries,

made even harder by his separation from his daughter Rebecca.

But now, 30 years later, he's been given a second chance.

Seeing my dad for the third time was really good, just to connect again,

and it was really good for him to bring some photographs from when

they were growing up and his sisters -

I've never seen them before.

I'm hoping to meet them in person.

It takes you right back

and makes you realise how different things were then.

It's good to know where my family came from,

like around this area, and what was actually happening in this area.

See the factory that they worked at and find out a little bit more

about the history and what they actually did.

My mum's always said, I don't think you look that much like her side

of the family, you've always looked more like your dad's side.

Looking at the photographs of my dad and with his sisters,

I can actually see that resemblance now.

Rebecca now has a family of her own and today,

her daughter Holly has made the trip up to Walsall to visit her grandad.

-Hello!

-Hello, Holly.

-Nice to meet you.

-Are you all right?

-Yes, lovely.

-Long time. How are you?

-I'm good, how are you?

Not too bad, thank you.

We've brought a present for you today, grandad.

We've brought you some photos...

Oh, thank you very much - that's absolutely...beautiful.

The first picture was me as a baby, five months old.

Absolutely beautiful.

You recognise?

That's a lovely photo.

That's me and my mum when I was born.

That's me and Holly when Holly was just a few months old.

I shall treasure this. It's absolutely beautiful.

-She's got the family red hair.

-Yeah.

And then there's some from when I was young.

I was in Zimbabwe there, in 1987.

I was 11 years old there.

That one was taken last year, just down the road from here, in Walsall.

We hadn't found you at that point, so you were probably

just down the road from us and we didn't know where you were.

-Thank you very much.

-That's all right.

-I'll give you a cuddle.

-I hope you enjoy looking at them.

-I will do.

I've enjoyed putting those together. It's been nice.

And you, look after yourself. Thank you.

The great thing is, even though we don't know each other well,

I've honestly got that connection, because you're my dad.

You can't replace that. I don't feel that way with other people, so...

-You won't, will you?

-I'd have loved

to have had you there when I got married, to give me away

and things like that. It was times like that that I really...

I really appreciate that, believe me, that you think like that, right?

-But there's only one thing I want you to do, is be happy.

-Yeah.

That's all I want in the world.

Well, I'm happier now that I've got you.

We've writ a book, a part of the book, it's not finished yet, right?

But now we're moving on to this chapter, your family.

This chapter in the book is the most interesting part of that book.

Let's leave it like that, yeah?

It's nice to actually show him, instead of just telling him,

what's been going on...

It's good that we've actually made the effort...

She's made the effort, to finally find him

and now hopefully, we'll be able to see him a lot more often.

I'm over the moon.

And I feel tremendous

that this... My own daughter

has searched after all these years for us to come together.

And now I know we can build a future from here.

This is the happiest thing that's happened to me in the last year

and it's something that I will never forget, you know?

Something you can't recreate.

I'm lucky to have the rest of my family around,

but this was like the missing piece, if you like.

So I'm really glad that I found my dad and now I can spend time with him

and my two daughters can spend time with him and if they have children,

hopefully he'll be around to be there for his great-grandchildren.

So for me, it's a great achievement, I'm really happy.

In Northumberland, 68-year-old George Chapman has been

reunited with three siblings he never knew he had.

George and his sister Thelma have only just met for the very

first time and George wants to spend some quality time with her

while she's over from Australia.

Thelma decides to show George the house that she originally

lived in as a child and when they arrive, George is in for a shock.

-So this is where it all began?

-Yes, it is, and it all looks different.

It all looks different, yes.

This is where you were born, is it?

Yes, it is. Gosh.

-Yeah.

-A long time ago!

Yes! Yes.

It turns out that George also lived on this same

street for a short period when he was a child.

I was living here for four weeks with our mother

and my adopted gran was living next door and...

-Yeah.

-Our gran...

-Our biological gran...

-Just lived a few doors away.

-25.

-Yes.

I only remember living with my gran and my uncle.

My gran knew everybody around.

There was always people in and out.

George has later childhood memories of visiting his grandmother.

I can remember being in an upstairs flat,

which could have been possibly my granny.

And although they have no memories of each other, they suspect

-they may well have met.

-When I was born, you were three...

That's right.

And your granny lived down there,

so we may have seen each other.

Your mother may have brought me down, or something like that,

you know. It's one of those things that we can't remember,

but it's a possibility, could have happened.

It's so strange that you were adopted to someone just here,

-in the same street.

-They possibly knew each other.

Oh, I would say they did.

They were very friendly and I think that's part of what happened.

Sadly, the exact reasons why George was adopted remain a mystery.

But having spent his whole life wishing he had siblings,

George's dream has come true.

Tonight, he gets to celebrate his sister's birthday

with his new-found family.

I'd just like to thank everyone for coming.

I'd like to thank George and family for looking and finding us,

it was the best thing that ever happened,

and to tell him all his new family love him and his family.

I'm sure Alan will agree - me and him are much closer now.

-And that's it!

-LAUGHTER

I was going to have a little party, but the girls decided I'm going

to have a big party, because I found my brother who I never knew I had

and it's the best thing that's ever happened.

This was the first time the four of us

have had a night out together and it's really good.

-Nice to take back memories to Australia.

-Yeah.

It's been a fabulous night. We're hoping to enjoy the rest of it.

Christine's speech was lovely

and I was very emotional when she made it.

Um... I really got...

You know, the lump in my throat at the time.

But it was nice she said some lovely words about my family and that

and I appreciate what she said.

It is better late than never, I mean, it's all happened in...

Say, really got together, in about six to eight weeks.

To be together like this, it's just fantastic, you know?

Being accepted is the main thing for me, being accepted.

I found them and I'll never let go.

That's what I want, that's what I've got!