The fourteenth series of ITV’s award-winning family history programme Long Lost Family returns tonight (8 July).
Presented by Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell with help from a team of trained intermediaries, DNA experts and investigators, Long Lost Family tells extraordinary stories of people yearning to find missing family. The series investigates mysteries that have troubled entire lives, uncovering answers that no one else could find.
In tonight’s episode, viewers meet 76-year-old Roslynne Webb, who lives in Cornwall but grew up in Coventry.
Ros became pregnant when she was sixteen. Her strict parents found her condition deeply shameful. To hide her pregnancy, Ros was sent 100 miles away to London to stay in a Church of England-run Mother and Baby home until the baby was born.
Ros was thrilled when her baby daughter was born in March 1965 and called her Christine. They were together at the Mother and Baby home for six weeks before Christine was adopted.
Ros has never stopped thinking about her daughter and wants to find her.
“The love remains,” she says. “It’s been with me since the day she was born. Christine is in my heart and my head.”
Long Lost Family’s specialist intermediaries discovered that Christine was adopted by a vicar and his wife in Kent and that she is now called Lyndsey. However, Lyndsey’s family seemed to move around a lot and tracing her was not straightforward. It was only when they discovered that she went on to marry that they traced her under her married name.
If you’re adopted, find out how you can trace your adoption record with our guide
Nicky Campbell meets Lyndsey. She says that she thought she’d traced her birth mother and she was a married woman with children, so she didn’t contact her because she didn’t want to bring up the past. Nicky tells Lyndsey that her mother is Ros, who has no other children. He gives her a letter Ros wrote and a photograph of her.
“It’s going to be one of the biggest things in my life,” Lyndsey says about meeting her birth mother.
In the other story in the episode, 61-year-old Tegan Cornish wants to find out more about her brother. Tegan was adopted as a baby. When she accesses her adoption records, she’s shocked to find that she has a younger brother called Kenneth. He was originally adopted by the same family, but was sent back into care when he was three months old.
“Knowing that he didn’t stay with me is quite devastating,” Tegan says. “I find that quite sad that we could have been together longer. I would absolutely love him to be back in my life.”
Kenneth was subsequently adopted by another family, and his name is now Kenneth Allen. Long Lost Family’s researchers contact every Kenneth Allen in the UK and they find him living in London, ten miles away from where Tegan grew up.
Kenneth is now a delivery driver. He says he had a “distanced” relationship with his adoptive family, but is now happily married to Elsie, his wife of 45 years. They have two daughters, seven grandchildren and one great grandchild.
“I would have loved to have grown up with Tegan,” he says.
Lyndsey comes down to Cornwall to meet Ros, and the two have an emotional reunion.
“I’m full of joy and happiness!” Ros says. “I want to stand on that step and shout to everybody, ‘I’ve met her, I’ve met my daughter’.”
Tegan and Kenneth are also overjoyed to finally meet.
“I’m super happy to have a blood brother,” Tegan says. “There is a bond between us. I feel at ease with him. I don’t feel like he’s a stranger at all.”