Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace: Poignant tale of foundlings who’ve spent years in search of their origins

This tear-jerking special edition of Long Lost Family has a universally poignant theme ★★★★✩
Lifelong search: David McBride, who was abandoned as a baby in Northern Ireland, with host Davina McCall.
ITV

“It’s just so important to know your identity,” says Helen Ward.

She is not talking about intersectionality, but the rather more fundamental questions of when and where she was born, who her parents were and why she was abandoned as a baby 51 years earlier, left in a phone box in Dundalk, Ireland, wrapped in a blanket, the bottle of milk still warm when she was found by a passing truck driver.

“No birth certificate, no birthday,” says David McBride, the other foundling featured in this emotionally fraught and compelling documentary, who was also discovered as a newborn, abandoned on the front seat of a parked car in someone’s drive on the outskirts of Belfast.

“When I was 17, I asked my [adoptive] dad, and he said, ‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’” continues Ward, who made several fruitless attempts to discover more about her origins, while McBride launched an appeal for information on the radio in 2002, also in vain.

Wall To Wall Productions

It’s hardly surprising that both felt their lives had been defined by this single awful event. “You spend your whole life looking for your family,” says Ward. “There’s a piece of you that cannot trust anyone,” says McBride.

In spite of several news stories at the time, no one ever connected the fact that both foundlings were left in tartan bags, Ward just south of the Irish border, McBride north of it. That is, until Ariel Bruce, a social worker who has made a career tracking down long lost relatives, did. When McBride, who is now 57, put his DNA details onto an online database, Bruce discovered he had a perfect match. Not a parent in fact, but a sister, a full sister. It was Ward.

With impeccable timing and some schmaltzy music, we watch Davina McCall, who co-presents the programme with Nicky Campbell, visit McBride in Birmingham to tell him he has a sister, while Campbell sets off for Navan, County Meath, to tell Ward that she has a brother. Photos are exchanged and tears are shed.

Television shows in 2020

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Eventually brother and sister meet for the first time — cue more tears, mine as well as theirs — and there’s an extraordinary moment when they compare photographs of their daughters, who look almost identical.

But there’s more. Bruce and her team have dug up information about their parents, including several photographs and, no spoilers, a tragic love story that leaves Brief Encounter in the shade.

Clearly such discoveries are only possible now thanks to DNA testing. However, the real message of this programme — which is a spin-off from the original Long Lost Family series — is a universally poignant one about the importance of family, of having roots and of knowing where you came from.

Things most of us take for granted. Part two, the stories of two more foundlings, is tomorrow night; I’m not sure I can take it.

Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace airs tonight at 9pm on ITV

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