Long Lost Family

Wendy O'Hagan is desperate to find her father Grant. Whilst Helen Harrison is searching for her son Dave.

David and Paul Shannon are searching for their father who disappeared from their lives when they were young boys. The family moved from Liverpool to South Africa in the early 1970s and returned a few years later when things did not work out. After a brief stay in England, their father went back to South Africa and, apart from one brief sighting, David and Paul have never seen him again. Also featured is Julia Evans, who grew up believing her mother had rejected her when she walked out of the family home when Julia was a baby. Her family's strict religious beliefs isolated her from the other kids in town, and at 16 Julia was cast out of the community for being a sinner. Ever since, Julia has longed to find her mother believing that she too might have been forced to leave.

This week on Long Lost Family two stories of children separated from their parents. Long distance lorry driver, Laurence Peat was given up for adoption at birth. Despite a happy childhood and loving adoptive parents, it has been as an adult that he has been unable to shake off the feeling that he was unwanted. For decades Laurence has lived with this sense of rejection which has affected his own ability to have successful relationships. In the hope that finding his birth mother would make this feeling go away, Laurence set out to track down his birth mother but the information on his adoption file led him nowhere. Now, he is making one final attempt to find her and lay to rest his sense of being unwanted. Also, the story of Denise Temple desperate to find her daughter who she battled to keep when she gave birth to her nearly fifty years ago. Originally from Yorkshire, Denise now lives in Spain. Six years ago, when her husband passed away, she finally decided she could no longer live with the pain caused by a decision she made when she was just a teenager. After a brief relationship with a local boy, Denise fell pregnant and at the age of sixteen, gave birth to a baby daughter. Desperate to keep her baby she struggled for three months to look after her daughter but with no support from her mother or step-father she finally was unable to cope and gave her daughter up for adoption. Now Denise is hoping that she will finally be reunited with her daughter that she once loved so much.

Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell present the series which sets out to reunite family members after years of separation. Robert Capron is 53, a devoted family man who lives in Devon but whose life today contrasts starkly with the world in which he grew up. At the age of two, Robert's mother abandoned him and not until his father's death was Robert able to start piecing together what little information he could find about her. After more than a decade of searching he is no closer to tracing her. Twin sisters Gail and Juliet Newmarch are 51. Their twin brothers were given up for adoption when they were very young. In fact, Gail and Juliet had no idea the boys existed until their father told them when they were in their teens. Their mother could not bear to talk about why she had done what she did and it was only when she died that Gail and Juliet felt able to start a search for their brothers.

Fifty-year-old Sharon Temple Sowerby grew up caught in a tug of love between two mothers. When she was a girl, Sharon discovered that the mother she knew of as 'mam' was not in fact her birth mother. Over the years, as the truth gradually emerged, Sharon discovered that she had been taken from her birth mother at only one hour old and given to a couple desperate for a child, who brought her up as their own. But Sharon also discovered that legally she was never theirs. Sharon's birth mother had refused to ever sign adoption papers and on several occasions actually asked for Sharon back. This tug of love continued until Sharon moved away to Germany with her parents. Heartbroken by these discoveries, Sharon has been searching for her birth mother for nearly thirty years but without success. Watch what happens when we take on this seemingly impossible search and meet the man searching for the same woman, who is also his birth mother.

Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell present the series which sets out to reunite family members after years of separation. Fifty one-year-old Londoner Chris Jones is searching for his sister who he last saw when she was a baby. Chris has little knowledge about his mother's past, but knows that his sister was born in a remote Northumberland vicarage, and that is where he starts looking for clues. Polly Gillon is searching for her eldest son who she was forced to give up for adoption in 1959. Polly grew up with her father in South London in the 1950s and when he discovered she was pregnant, he forced her to make a heart-breaking decision. She was given the choice: give her baby up for adoption or never come home. With no one else to turn to, Polly finally accepted her father's terms and gave her baby up. She has spent a lifetime regretting this decision and is desperate to ask her son to forgive her.

Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell uncover more family secrets. Val Milnes became pregnant at 18, and knowing that her strict father would never allow her to keep the child, she made the heartbreaking decision to give him up for adoption. She watched as he was taken away by his new parents with the case of clothes she had carefully prepared. Seventeen years later, Val suffered an accident which left her paralysed and tried to establish contact with her son, sending him a series of letters. The fact that these letters went unanswered has haunted her ever since. In the second of tonight's stories, Donna Leaver told her father Pat in a telephone call that she did not want him in her life any more when she was 6 years old. Taking her word for it, Pat disappeared and made no further attempt to contact her.