Nicky Campbell and Davina McCall return to our screens tonight in the new season of the award winning show Long Lost Family. Across six new episodes, Davina and Nicky bring family members together who have been separated for most of their lives. Some have spent years desperately trying to track down their loved ones in vain. This season promises to be the most emotional yet with the Long Lost Family team travelling as far as Canada and South Africa to track down separated relatives.
Tonight we will meet Susan and Chris Ellerton. They are the first couple to approach Long Lost Family looking for a child that they gave up for adoption. Together for over 50 years, the couple are desperately searching for the child they gave up as confused and frightened unmarried 15- and 16-year olds. They went on to have five children and emigrated to Canada in 1981. Devastated by the way their parents took over and forced them to give their child away, Susan feels a heavy burden, “Are we going to live out our lives and never know? I need to know that he’s been okay, and that he forgives us for what we did.”
On tonight’s episode we also meet Paul, a civil servant and former soldier. Paul was one of over 50,000 British troops in West Germany during the 1980s as part of the West’s Cold War defences. During his time there he met and fell in love with a local German girl called Michelle. They began a relationship and when Paul was just 20 they discovered that she was pregnant. Before his daughter was a year old he was posted back to the UK and returned alone. Paul made sure to keep contact with his German family, making a daily pilgrimage to the local phone box to talk to Michelle and find out how his daughter was. But six months later Michelle stopped answering and instead her grandmother picked up the phone and told him that Michelle was married to someone else and he wasn’t to bother the family anymore. Paul has never stopped thinking about his daughter, “I do worry she may think I didn’t care, that I abandoned her. I want to know how her life has been, has she got children of her own? She’s 29 now and I left when she was one.”
Will Susan and Chris find the son they gave up as teenagers? Is Paul destined to be reunited with the daughter he left behind in Germany? Find out tonight at 9pm on ITV.
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