Episode 9 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 the 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.

Scattered amongst the UK population of just over 64 million people

are many long-lost loved ones.

And for those family members desperate to find them,

it can feel like an impossible task.

But around the country are bands of dedicated searchers who make

it their quest to help reunite families,

even when the odds are stacked against them.

And for some of these family finders, the harder the case

and the greater the challenge, the better.

I thought this search was the most difficult search I'd ever done.

So, professionally, from my point of view,

we were in heaven with it, really. It was fantastic.

Fraser Kinnie runs a family finding agency in Hartlepool.

And the thrill of the chase is what gets him out of bed in the morning.

Christina had been looking for her sisters for many, many years

but I did feel that if anybody could do it, I felt I could do it.

Christina Boston lives in Stockton-on-Tees in County Durham.

She was born in Middlesbrough in 1971.

Christina spent the first 18 months of her life with her

birth mother, but was then taken into care

until she was adopted by new parents, Pam and Brian.

Really good happy times with the family.

Absolutely brilliant parents, you couldn't ask for a nicer family.

And they also fostered other children as well,

so I obviously had a big family to grow up with as well.

I didn't really know much about my birth mother.

Only from bits of what Pam and Brian had told me.

When she was nine,

Christina got wind of a letter which her birth mother had left for her.

My friend in the street at the time overhead her mum and my mum

talking about this letter that Brenda had written to me

and it was put in my file, my adoption file.

She told me about this letter and I can remember

asking my mum for this letter and wanted to know what was in it.

And when I asked she said, "No problem, I'll give you it."

She gave me it straight away and it was just a little note,

I can't remember what was in it word for word, it was something like,

"I love you, I didn't want to give you up," I think something like that.

But it was just very short, very sweet

and it just came from the heart.

The sentiment of the letter stayed with Christina over the years.

But it wasn't until she was 19 that her first husband

took it upon himself to look for her birth mum.

It actually had her address on the corner,

where she lived years ago, and he just happened to go up to that house

and asked the neighbour where she was living.

So he took me there to this neighbour's house

and she looked at me and she went, "You're Brenda's daughter, aren't you?"

The neighbour didn't just know where Christina's mum was living,

she knew where she was at that very moment.

And she took me to her.

She was actually in bingo in Stockton High Street.

And I can remember to this day, on the intercom they said,

"Can a Brenda Lillystone

"go to the reception, your daughter's waiting."

And she just came out.

She just came outside and we just looked at each other.

It was just... It wasn't like you see on the telly and you hug,

we just looked and stared at each other for a minute or two

and then just sort of hugged each other and that was it.

I just couldn't believe that all them years

that I'd been living in Stockton, she lived round the corner.

I said I'd probably past her hundreds of times on the street.

Christina and Brenda wasted no time in getting to know each other.

Really, we didn't act like mother and daughter, obviously,

because you can't get 20-odd years back.

And it wasn't long before Christina made another discovery that

would shape the rest of her life.

It turned out she had two sisters.

When I first met Brenda, she told me that there were twin girls called,

they had strange names, Rosetta and Priscilla Lillystone.

But Brenda revealed she'd also had to give up Rosetta and Priscilla

as a result of mental health problems.

She didn't want to give us up, but because of the situation,

she obviously couldn't cope with us at the time and she gave us

the best option in life - for us, not for her.

But she gave us the best option she could give us by giving us up.

Rosetta and Priscilla were the last children Brenda was allowed

to have before the state intervened.

Because of her health they made her get sterilised.

It was sad, she couldn't remember a lot and obviously

because the other girls were taken away at a young age, that was

something that, it destroyed her at the end.

It finished her off, I suppose.

Christina resolved to track down her twin sisters -

as much for Brenda's sake as for her own.

Every time I went round to Brenda's she always

talked about my sisters, that she didn't want to give us up

and she always hoped that she would see them all one day.

That was her dream, a bit like mine,

that's all I ever wanted was to find my sisters.

Christina did all she could to find the twins and fulfil her mum's dream.

But the relationship with her birth mother ended as suddenly as it began.

She passed away and I went to the funeral and...

47 years old.

Her life was gone like that.

I'm glad that I did get to meet her, very glad

to meet my birth mother because it's something you can never get back.

I didn't get a childhood with her but I did get to see

her before she passed away and it means a lot to me.

After Brenda's death from a heart condition,

Christina tried to carry on with her life.

But as the years passed, her desire to find her sisters remained.

And when she was in her 30s,

she decided to ask her adoptive mum Pam for help.

I've always felt that when we adopted you that when you wanted

to find your family...

Obviously, there was a little bit of...maybe jealousy...

On Brenda's side, yeah.

Yeah, I wasn't too happy you'd found her

but I felt you had your right to know them if you wanted to.

It's not at all common for an adoptive parent to help

in the search for a birth family,

but Pam put any misgivings to one side for the sake of her daughter.

She helped Christina sift through her adoption papers,

searching for any clues about her twin sisters.

"Christine's mother is expecting twins in about six weeks' time."

It says there she was going into the hospital for eight weeks until after the birth.

-Well, I suppose if you're having twins...

-Oh, right.

This is very cold, almost.

It's just as it is, I suppose, but it doesn't mention feelings.

Pam took it upon herself to solve the case,

researching adoption records, trawling websites

and doing everything she could think of to try

and find the elusive Rosetta and Priscilla.

I literally went on adoption sites

and left quite a few messages all over the place.

For years, Pam and Christina hoped to hear from the girls

or for a lead of any kind,

but every avenue led to another dead end.

-We knew nothing, really.

-No.

-We were just searching and searching.

I think I got to the point with the twins

that I thought maybe they'd left the country or...

Because they were just not there.

-We couldn't find them.

-Yeah.

And Pam wasn't alone in her search.

The case became famous amongst amateur family finders,

but despite their best efforts,

Rosetta and Priscilla were no closer to being found.

Until Fraser Kinney decided to get involved.

I'd known about this search for the twins for a long time.

Probably four, five years, I'd seen their posts on social media

and search websites and it always kind of interested me.

In 1972, more than 40,000 children were adopted.

Due to the Summer of Love in 1969, the late '60s, early '70s,

the task is actually twice as hard as it would have been,

because the registers are twice the size they would have been.

Because people were having too much fun.

The problem was, just like all the amateur enthusiasts,

he couldn't find Rosetta and Priscilla.

Most people who looked at this search were struggling

because they were looking for the names Rosetta and Priscilla.

And that's when Fraser had an idea.

What if the names were the problem all along?

He decided to test his theory.

The difficulty in this search was that we didn't know

what their new names were.

But now, without even the names to go on,

Fraser really was looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

We had to refer back to the adoption register for 1972.

There was only one thing for it.

Fraser began the laborious task of trawling through

an entire year's worth of adoption records.

What we're really looking for, are two people with the same surname

whose adoption numbers are in sequence.

And then what we basically had to do was go through all of these,

working out who all the twins were.

I was then checking up on our system to see what their dates of birth were,

to see if it was the 20th July, 1972, which we knew was the twins' date of birth.

We found this page here and their date of births corresponded,

so we knew there was a good chance these were the girls.

Fraser had found two possible names.

But would they be Christina's twin sisters?

And if they were, how would they react to being found?

As well as professionals like Fraser,

the UK is home to thousands of amateur genealogists,

who like nothing better

than helping put other people back in touch with their lost family.

One such enthusiast is Wendy Thompson, who by her own admission,

is addicted to the thrill of uncovering family mysteries.

It just became an obsession, from day one.

I would work all day, I'd then get back on the computer again.

At bedtime I'd be lying in bed thinking,

"Now, who could I find was related to who..."

And, "Where can I check the records for that..."

And, "Is there anywhere else I could look..."

And it just became an absolute obsession, it really did.

But little did Wendy realise when digging into one particular case,

that she would make an unexpected discovery about her own family.

Adrian Searle is 61 and lives in Wootton Bridge on the Isle of Wight.

I was born in London and then, in the very late '50s, early '60s,

we all moved out to a place called Billericay in Essex.

The family enjoyed a comfortable new life in the Essex countryside,

but when Adrian was still just a boy, tragedy struck.

And life would never be the same again.

I was about ten or 11,

and we were taking a day trip over to France,

and we'd just got off the ferry and my mother was taken ill,

and she just collapsed on the floor.

I rushed into a chemist with my schoolboy French,

trying to get some seasick tablets, I thought she was seasick.

And there was nothing there.

So we got a taxi, we took her to the harbour doctor.

He immediately got an ambulance and we drove to Calais Hospital.

And I remember it now. That was four o'clock and at twenty-past four,

my dad came out, his hair was standing on end,

he was white as a sheet, and he just said, "She's dead, son."

She'd died within 20 minutes.

And that was just horrendous. Horrendous.

It took me years to even speak about that without getting upset.

We were absolutely devastated. You know, obviously. She was only 48.

Widowed, his father was now left to raise Adrian and his brothers.

No mean feat for a man on his own in the '60s.

My dad used to work six days a week to keep us together.

I can remember going to school in... holes in my shoe,

with cardboard to cover up the holes, because he couldn't afford shoes.

Because, obviously, single-parent, three boys to look after, you know.

He struggled.

Despite his father's best efforts, the grief that followed

his mother's death had a grave impact on all their relationships.

It kind of destroyed the family.

We never really got on and we just drifted apart.

His father later remarried but relations

between him and his son only worsened.

And when Adrian was a teenager, things came to a head.

I'd started work, actually, I'd only been at work a week, and I cut

my thumb really bad, I've still got the scar there,

and I needed stitches in it.

I went home, obviously, because I was only 15.

His father's reaction was less than sympathetic.

He said, "You've got a choice".

He said, "You can either work and help your stepmother around the house,

"or you can get out."

Well, that's like red rag to a bull to me.

So I just packed my suitcase and that was it, I went.

Still a child, Adrian left home.

I was on my own from 15 and I went in the catering trade,

travelled around most of the country.

My father and I never spoke for 15 years.

Decades later, Adrian and his father resolved their differences.

But his dad died in 1998.

After his death, Adrian's relationship with his brothers fell apart.

I know nothing about them now.

I can't see us ever getting back together again, never.

With his father and brothers now gone from his life,

Adrian felt a profound sense of loss.

His dad's death highlighted how little Adrian knew about his life.

He yearned to feel closer to him in the only way now possible -

through researching his past.

I was interested about HIS father.

All through the time I knew my dad,

he never once mentioned his father and I thought, he must have had one.

I just presumed that his father had died during the First World War

and he didn't really know his dad.

Adrian had only the bare minimum to get him started.

All I had to go on was my father's full name,

and my grandmother's Christian name.

After some detective work, he found a record of his grandad,

but this discovery was bittersweet.

He died in 1971.

And by 1971, I was 19.

He was still alive when I was a teenager. That was a total shock.

Total shock.

I felt cheated that I never got to even know my grandfather.

This upsetting revelation begged the question,

why had his father hidden Grandfather Searle from him?

But little did Adrian know his quest to find out more

was about to throw up an even more remarkable discovery.

Christina Boston and her adoptive mum, Pam,

had spent ten fruitless years searching for Christina's

younger twin sisters, Priscilla and Rosetta.

My birth mother couldn't care for us herself.

She didn't want to give us up, but, because of the situation,

she obviously couldn't cope with us at the time.

Among amateur family finders, the case had become famous for its difficulty,

and had left everyone flummoxed.

Until a professional, Fraser Kinney, took it on.

I'd known about the search for the twins for a long time,

and it always kind of interested me.

He tracked down a potential match, but instead of Priscilla and Rosetta,

these twins had the rather less exotic names of Rachel and Sarah.

When we got to this page and we saw Sarah and Rachel's name

and we knew their dates of birth were the dates we were looking for,

all of a sudden, we'd gone from 40,000 names, down to two.

And they, we thought, were the two names we were looking for.

So what we then had to do, was find out who they were and where they are today.

With the hard part done, Fraser made quick work of locating the twins.

And 300 miles away in Southampton,

Sarah and Rachel were about to get the shock of their lives.

-Give us a squeeze, then!

-Oh!

-Get off me, you're wet.

About six months ago, we had a very strange phone call from

a man called Fraser, looking for me and Rachel.

And I said, "Yes, that's me",

and he says, "Do you know that your sister

"has been searching for you for ten years or something like this?"

And I'm like, "My God." Straight away, it was very strange.

I got very emotional, very quickly, right, and I'm...

I started crying, sitting on the bed and I'm like...

SHE MAKES STUTTERING SOUND

Like a gibbering wreck!

My partner then thinks, "Oh, I'm going to have to phone Rachel now,

"straight away, and tell her."

-I was on the bus.

-Oh, and it was... Oh, it was absolutely mad. Completely mad.

-It was mad.

-SHE LAUGHS

Rachel and Sarah Garbutt were born within minutes of each other.

We were fostered pretty much from when our mother gave birth,

and then after the age of about one,

we got officially adopted by our parents now.

Obviously, we were lucky, I think, that we were kept together,

because it could have been very different.

-And, yeah, our childhood was quite a happy one, wasn't it?

-It was.

-It was very, very good, yeah, we...

-We moved about a lot.

Always, you know, doing clubs and you know, always together.

-We'd fight a lot as well, though.

-Oh, we did. We did have our moments.

I've stuck a pencil up her nose and made her nose bleed.

SARAH LAUGHS

She's had my head down the side of the sofa,

punching me in the head and... SARAH LAUGHS

Oh, yeah, we've been through it.

-We are close though.

-Yeah.

As children, they took the news

that they were adopted in their stride.

Where we was younger, we was about seven, or thereabouts,

she told us that we was adopted, explained in a way, you know, like,

"Well, you were chosen, you were special, we chose you", you know.

And said our natural mother had been ill,

this is why we was looked after by them.

-At the time, it probably went over the head.

-Yeah.

Too much information.

You haven't got no stress in life, you just think, "OK, that's cool",

and you just move on and you carry on with life as you know it.

And that's what we knew.

It wasn't until they were older and Sarah had children of her own

that the twins felt ready to find their birth mother,

and ordered up the adoption papers.

12 years ago, when I got my adoption stuff through in the post,

I discovered that we were named other names when we were born.

So Rachel was born first, she was born Priscilla Lillystone.

I was born second, and I was called Rosetta Lillystone,

and our mum's name was Brenda Lillystone.

And it was really strange finding out you were born another different name.

Eager to find their birth mother,

Rachel turned to a colleague at work for help.

There was a lady that used to do family tree sort of work.

So I gave her what I knew, which was her name and her date of birth.

And that was it.

So I kept seeing her and she kept looking at me and never said anything,

and I kept leaving it and leaving it,

and then I thought, I'm going to ask her.

So I approached and said, "Have you found out anything?"

And she sort of looked at me a bit sheepish,

and I thought, mmm. I said, "She's dead, isn't she?"

And she said, "Yeah, she died like, ten years ago, or something."

So I think she's been dead about 20 years.

So that was all a bit of a shock, because I thought, well,

she was only young, but if she had lots of health issues and what not, you know...

We never got to meet our natural mum.

When we tried to do the trace, she'd already passed.

So, unfortunately, for us, it was left too late.

The twins had sadly missed out on the chance of

ever getting to know their birth mother.

But now they'd been put in touch

with a sister they never knew they had.

Fraser rung me out of the blue. A very excitable man, he was.

Garbled all a load of stuff, and all I heard was, "I've found your twin sisters."

And after that, I didn't care what else he said.

I was that shocked, because it was out of the blue.

For me, it was a good buzz,

never mind them. Because obviously the search is all about them,

but from a professional point of view, we were excited because we

had pulled off something that we felt was a really, really hard search.

The three sisters had found each other after a lifetime apart.

Making contact for the first time could have been a nerve-racking experience,

but it turned out to be anything but.

When I spoke to my sister, Sarah, for the first time,

it was like we'd known each other for years.

Like we'd been sisters for years.

She said, "Yeah, I'm sat here, tears coming down my face and sort of...

-SHE MAKES STUTTERING SOUND

-..a bit jittery.

But, oh, it was brilliant.

It's like you're in a dream, really.

It was absolutely brilliant. I think we were just both in shock,

we just never shut up.

I think she's as mad as we are.

She talks as much as we do.

Oh, God, yeah, we could out-talk each other quite easily.

Obviously, she's got the very strong northern accent,

which we don't have, but...

Oh, it's brilliant. It really is. It is.

It's like it's sort of...

It's made our family unit that much bigger, hasn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

Christina's met her younger sisters on a handful of occasions,

but there's someone extremely important the twins are yet to meet.

Today, Christina's introducing Rachel and Sarah

to her adoptive mum, Pam, for the very first time.

I think I'm feeling more nervous now than I was when I first met them.

-I don't know...

-It's cos we're getting close,

we're going to meet them any minute.

Christina and Pam have travelled 300 miles from their home

in Stockton-on-Tees to the south coast.

And Pam's excited at what the day has in store.

It's almost like...I'm extending my family.

-They're your sisters, but because you're my daughter...

-Mm-hm.

-..they're like my daughters in a...

-Yeah.

-But, I don't know.

It's a strange... It's like just accepting them as part of our family.

But first, Pam leaves her adopted daughter Christina to meet

-her younger sisters on her own.

-All right, I'll see you later, Mam.

-All right, bye.

-Bye.

-Go and have a nice time.

-I'll see you later.

-Right, bye, Mam.

The twins can't wait to get back together with the older sister

they never knew they had.

We are the most excited ever in the whole wide world

to see our sister Christina again.

Yeah, and also to meet her mum.

-It's, like, well exciting.

-We feel like jitterbugs.

-Jitterbugs.

-All, sort of, jittery.

If she starts crying, I know I will, and I can't be doing that.

After so many years apart,

face-to-face contact with their older sister is precious.

Hi!

Oh, how you doing?

-All right?

-How you doing?

-Brilliant.

-Hey, you.

-Brilliant.

LAUGHTER

-I'm crying already.

-I know.

-Oh...

-Yeah.

The sisters have already marked their new relationships

with sister rings.

-You've got your ring on. I've got mine on.

-Yes.

'When I got the sister ring off them, it made me feel like a sister.'

It means so much to me, because it's all I ever wanted to do.

As the twins never got to meet their birth mother,

Christina's brought some treasured photos along

to show Rachel and Sarah what she looked like.

-That's... That's Brenda, and that's...

-Oh, my goodness.

..her husband Bob. That's their wedding day.

-Wow.

-That's the one... You can keep that one.

-That's a copy of that one.

-Oh, she looks amazing,

-doesn't she?

-That's...

-That's Brenda.

-She looks quite short, doesn't she?

Unless he was tall.

-He is, yeah.

-Bob's tall, yeah.

-Wow, that's mad, isn't it?

-Mmm.

All three sisters were taken into care,

partly as a result of mental health issues suffered by their mum Brenda,

who later underwent sterilisation at the hands of the state.

The way in which the state deals with those suffering with

mental health problems has changed beyond recognition

over the past century, and although the early '70s,

when Christina's mother was unwell, marked a time of reform,

social attitudes were far from what they are today,

and patients would have had fewer choices and less rights.

Up until the 1960s,

asylum-based care was the main model of psychiatric treatment.

The number of patients in asylums peaked in the mid-1950s,

at around 150,000.

The 1959 Mental Health Act abolished

the distinction between psychiatric and other hospitals,

and encouraged the development of community care,

and through the 1960s, advances in psychiatry

and drug treatment put a greater emphasis on human rights.

But mental health remains a factor in many cases of separated families.

Photos of Brenda Lillystone are rare,

and these are the only ones that Christina has.

-She didn't take a lot of photographs.

-No?

-Oh, right.

-No, no.

And like I said, I cried my eyes out cos I didn't...

When I met her, I thought,

-"I've got more time to spend with her and take photographs."

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

-She died, so I never got a chance to get a photograph of her.

-Oh...

-Look at that.

-She looks quite like you, though, I think.

I think there's a look a bit about both of you, I do.

-Yeah.

-A little bit.

What sort of conversations did you have with her when you met?

-It wasn't a mother-daughter relationship...

-Yeah.

-It was just like talking as a friend would.

-Like a friend, yeah.

But I think that what I knew at the time...

If I'd knew she was going to pass, I would have obviously gone

-into greater detail...

-Yeah, of course.

..but it was just a friend, really, cos I never called her....

-never called her Mum.

-Never called her Mum.

-No, couldn't do that.

Although Rachel and Sarah never got the chance to meet their mother,

Christina's photos provide some sense of connection.

I think you look like her.

-Yeah, probably there is.

-There's a bit, isn't there?

-You think?

-There is a resemblance.

-I do, yeah, I do.

Think there's a little bit there.

It was her dream to meet us all. It just wasn't meant to be.

Oh, bless her.

Quite sad, really.

-It is.

-Mmm.

-Yeah.

But there's another very important person in Christina's life that she

can't wait to introduce to her new-found sisters -

her adoptive mum Pam,

without whose help, they would never have been reunited.

Ah!

Oh, you go... You go first.

LAUGHTER

-Hello.

-Hiya, darling. How are you?

-Thanks for coming.

-Oh, God.

Thanks for coming, Pam.

-Oh.

-It's really lovely to see you.

-Oh, it's great.

You're a star.

I feel like a star.

-We brought you a little gift each.

-Oh...

Just a little token gift.

-Not going to make me cry again, are you?

-Yes, probably.

-Oh... Oh, that's gorgeous.

-It's nice, isn't it?

Cos they know I like owls. That's beautiful. Thank you, thanks for it.

-Christine buys crystal, yeah.

-That's OK.

I do. That's lovely, that.

-Oh, lovely.

-It'll go with my other owls.

I thought, well, we couldn't come empty-handed.

I am...not really...

Pam deserves a little gift, cos of all the help that you gave.

At the end of the day, well, if we could have bought you a medal,

-we would have bought you one, Pam.

-Don't bother.

It's the end of the search, isn't it?

It's...

It's just...

Well, what they call closure, I suppose, isn't it?

It is, it is.

And I was imagining you to be about six, two little girls...

-Yeah.

-Aw, bless...

It's just been the most wonderful experience, I think,

-so far of my whole entire life.

-It's been like a whirlwind.

-Like a whirlwind.

-It has, cos it's all happened so quickly.

Cos that was Brenda's dream, to see all her daughters together,

and unfortunately it didn't happen,

but she's up there looking down, and I hope that she's happy up there,

now that we've all met up and we're all together.

If you're researching your own family,

be prepared that there may come a point when you hit a wall,

and it seems you can't go any further.

Take a step away from your search,

and give yourself time to approach it with fresh eyes.

If you can't find the person you're looking for,

you might switch tack, and look for a relative instead -

perhaps someone with a more distinctive name

who could lead you to your target.

It's worth going back to resources you've searched before.

Websites such as ancestry.com have new documents added to them

all the time.

And of course, it can pay dividends to seek help from other

amateur family-finders online.

After all, many heads are very often better than one.

Following his father's death, 61-year-old Adrian Searle

was compelled to find out more about his dad's life.

All through the time I knew my dad, he never once mentioned his father,

and I thought, "He must have had one."

Adrian was shocked to discover that he'd had a grandfather

who he'd never met.

Once I found my grandfather, I could find where he was born,

but I couldn't find anything previous.

So he was a dead end, I couldn't go any further.

I just thought, "Well, you know,

"I'm going to need a little help here."

Desperate to get to the bottom of this family mystery,

he made a plea on an online forum.

I put a notice on the... on the message board,

and up popped this person called Wendy Thompson.

Adrian's post was picked up by genealogy fanatic Wendy Thompson,

who was online updating her own ever-growing family tree,

and keeping an eye out for other people she could help.

My tree is huge. We've got thousands of people on it.

Wendy caught the family-finding bug

after helping a colleague track down his birth mother.

He knew her name, and he knew roughly how old she was,

and, erm, eventually, after much searching, I found her.

And he was so excited,

and it was just one of the greatest things that I've ever done.

Ever since, Wendy's kept an eye out for other people she can help.

Adrian's post caught her attention, and some initial digging revealed

some uncanny parallels between her life and Adrian's.

Wendy lives on the Sussex coast with her husband Colin.

I was born in Birmingham,

but we moved down to Brighton when I was 12.

I was a war baby, and I didn't meet my father

until I was just coming up to three.

And until I got married, when I was 21,

we really didn't get on that well,

but after I got married, everything changed and, erm,

we became good friends in the end.

Despite being close to her father, like Adrian,

her grandfather's life was shrouded in secrecy.

I didn't know anything about my grandfather.

Erm, my father rarely spoke about him,

and yet, he was still alive when I was alive,

and I never knew about any of my father's family

apart from his mother.

And again, just like Adrian, it was the death of Wendy's parents

which ignited her preoccupation with the past.

I got into genealogy when my parents died, 11 years ago.

It just became such an obsession.

Now, Wendy's obsession appeared to be taking her in an unexpected

direction, because it wasn't just Adrian's life story that

struck a chord, it was his surname.

I thought, "Oh, I recognise that name,"

and it was also a Searle, so that sort of got my interest.

Searle was also Wendy's maiden name,

and she began to suspect that she may have stumbled across

a member of her own family,

but to be sure, she needed more information.

At the end of her e-mail, she said, "Who was your dad?"

And obviously, I wrote back, and said Eric Albert William.

So I went into the tree and found that, yes,

it was the same person, same dates and everything,

so I got back to him and said, "I think you and I are related."

It turned out that Grandfather and her grandfather were brothers.

And it was just really exciting.

I'd said, "I think you're my second cousin."

For Adrian, the discovery of a living relative

was more than he'd bargained for

when he'd embarked on this search into the past.

To find that Wendy was actually related to me

was totally awe-inspiring.

It took me days for it to sink in.

It was just...

It was just a fantastic feeling.

Adrian's wasted no time getting to know Wendy.

Today, he's making the journey to the mainland from his home

on the Isle of Wight to see her for only the third time.

I've missed Wendy for 50-odd years,

and I'll never get them back,

so the more I can see Wendy, the better it'll be.

Adrian immediately felt a strong bond with his new relative.

She may only be his second cousin,

but Wendy means far more to him than that would imply.

I look upon her as a sister,

and making the journey to see my...

my sister again, very emotional.

Very emotional.

I never had a brother, and always wanted one.

And then, yes, he is my...

-He is my adopted brother.

-Brilliant.

It's hard to believe that this pair almost didn't meet.

The first journey, I came over,

and I was told to look for a woman in a white puffa jacket,

and when I got to the train station,

there was no woman in a white puffa jacket.

When I met him, I knew who it was immediately,

cos there were tears streaming down his face.

And we hugged each other, and he said,

"You're not wearing your puffa jacket." And I said,

"No." I said, "Sorry about that, but I decided not to, in case

"I didn't like the look of you, and then I could pretend you weren't...

"I wasn't me."

The two cousins have arranged to meet on the clifftops

near Wendy's Brighton home.

-Waiting for somebody special?

-Hello.

Today, Wendy and Adrian are on a mission.

How are you doing?

They've each been doing some more research,

keen to get to the bottom of why there was such secrecy

surrounding both their grandfathers' lives.

Wendy's grandad's name was Victor,

while Adrian's grandfather was Albert, or Harry to his friends.

-Now, that's Harry.

-Ah.

He's quite like...quite like Victor.

Same shaped faces, and everything.

-Chunky.

-He has, he's got the same cheekbones.

-They were brothers, were they?

-Yeah.

-So...

We shouldn't be surprised that they look alike.

-Yes, the resemblance is there.

-Yes.

Wendy's been researching Albert's past,

and has uncovered an extremely colourful life story.

Goodness, you have been busy.

And I've got here that your grandfather was a violinist,

played in an orchestra...

Albert was part of an orchestra who provided the soundtrack to the

silent movies of the era, but it was a career with a short shelf life.

The talkies came in in the late '20s.

Yes, so he'd have been put out of work.

-Probably been redundant.

-Yes.

Wendy thinks this fall from grace could explain why

he was never spoken about.

If he did have bad luck in his life,

maybe he was ostracised from his family.

And Adrian also has new information suggesting Albert may have

brought shame on the family, but for a different reason entirely.

I'm just wondering if he was ostracised because he left

my grandmother, and my father didn't know anything about his father.

-Divorce was so frowned upon, wasn't it?

-Hmm...

-Well, you didn't divorce in them days, did you?

-No, you didn't.

No, you just didn't. You didn't even leave.

And if you did divorce, you...

-Well, your name was black, wasn't it?

-Oh, yeah.

-Yeah.

And so, that might explain why my father never talked about his father.

Yes.

-Cos he probably didn't know him.

-No.

But what of Wendy's grandfather, Albert's brother Victor?

Wendy may have got to the bottom of why he, too,

was shrouded in mystery.

Victor was injured in the war.

He lost an arm.

Victor was suffering from shellshock,

a common condition for serving soldiers at that time.

He ended up mentally ill because of the war.

He was in a hut, and they were captured and shot,

and he never really recovered.

It was an era in which mental health was poorly understood,

and any issues could sometimes be swept under the carpet

by embarrassed families.

-That was a terrible time.

-Dreadful, dreadful.

Whatever the reason, the most important thing is that right here,

right now, two lost cousins have found each other

and are revelling in their new-found friendship.

Meeting Adrian again has just been great,

and we've just caught up as if we saw each other last week, you know.

It's been very good. Enjoyed it, very much.

Fabulous experience, absolutely fabulous.

Been lovely catching up with Wendy. Marvellous.

It's been great being with him,

and I really do think that it would have been nicer to have known him

a lot longer, so that I could have had a brother a lot longer.

He's just one of the family, now, so, you know, he'll always be here.