The latest episode of Long Lost Family will air on ITV tonight (19 August) at 9pm.
Presented by Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell, Long Lost Family is a true-life series about people seeking expert help to trace long-lost family members and solve mysteries in their family trees.
In tonight’s episode, viewers meet 66-year-old Charlotte from Blackpool. Charlotte was recently diagnosed with bowel cancer, and although it was successfully treated, it’s made it more urgent for her to track down her long-lost daughter.
As a teenager, Charlotte was close to her father, but argued with her mother and often felt rebellious. She got pregnant when she was sixteen and tried to run away from home. The police brought her back and her parents had her made a ward of court.
Charlotte gave birth to a daughter. She was delighted with her and named her Tracey, after a song she liked by The Cufflinks.
Charlotte’s parents placed her in a school for teenage mothers. Charlotte realised it was no place for Tracey and agreed to have her adopted. Although Charlotte now has another daughter, Deana, and grandchildren, she has never stopped missing Tracey.
“Where is she now?” she says. “Does she think of me, does she know about me? I would love to be able to find her and to be able to know that she’s not hated me for what I did. She was always with me, wherever I went.”
The Long Lost Family team find that Tracey, now called Sarah, is living in Lancashire, just fourteen miles away from Charlotte.
Sarah had a happy upbringing. Her parents had three other children – one adopted and two birth sons. She is now caring for her adopted mother, who has Alzheimer’s.
Sarah says she worried that her birth mother hadn’t wanted her, so she’s relieved to hear how much Charlotte wanted and missed her. She became a single mother at a young age and her son is actually one year older than her half-sister Deana, so she empathises with how difficult it would have been for Charlotte. She’s moved to read a letter from Charlotte and see a picture of her.
“My Mum has brought me up and this lady’s never going to take her place, but she’s already taken a different place in my heart,” she says.
Elsewhere, the team meet 40-year-old Jenna Brooks, who was born in Oxford but grew up in Scotland, where she now lives. Jenna was conceived with the aid of a sperm donor after her parents struggled with infertility.
At the time, donors were guaranteed anonymity, and there was no limit on the number of times a donor could donate.
“It blows my mind when I think about how many donor-conceived children there may be from this one donor, and where they may be,” Jenna says. “Looking around, it could be virtually anyone.”
Jenna tells her best friend Fiona that she’s interested in trying to find her donor, but also any potential half-siblings.
“I feel like I’m not looking for a replacement Dad,” she says. “I’ve got a Dad. For me, I guess as an only child growing up, the main part of that has always been the sibling side of it, and whether or not there is anyone else that’s like me out there.”
The Long Lost Family team test Jenna’s DNA on the three biggest commercial DNA databases. They aren’t able to identify the donor, but they discover that she has a biological half-sister who she shares a father with, but who was not donor conceived.
Jenna’s half-sister, Cassie, is six years younger than her and also lives in Scotland. When presenter Nicky Campbell meets Cassie, she says that she never knew her biological father and doesn’t know his identity, but she’s thrilled to hear that she has a sister.
Cassie is a tarot reader and astrologist and says that she can feel Jenna’s energy from a photograph of her.
“I love her so much already,” she says. “I can’t wait to meet her… No matter what, I will always be there for her.”
Sarah has an emotional reunion with Charlotte and Deana.
“It’s like I’ve gone to heaven and come back again,” Charlotte says. “I’m feeling so much warmth between us. It’s like I was hugging that child again.”
Jenna and Cassie are also thrilled to meet each other and discover all their similarities, including a shared sense of style and interest in weightlifting. They also want their children to meet each other in the future.
“None of this journey has felt real,” Jenna says. “I’ve gone from being an only child to finding a sibling I didn’t know I had, and she’s just lovely.”