Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace 2023 sees the BAFTA-winning documentary spin-off returning for its fifth series.
The Long Lost Family spin-off has been helping foundlings — people abandoned as babies, often within days of the start of their lives — to trace their own heritage and try to track down their family members for over five years.
To date, presenters Nicky Campbell and Davina McCall and their search team have utilized the latest DNA technology and genetic genealogy techniques to help over thirty foundlings unlock their personal pasts.
In Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace 2023, they're returning to help five more people, including one foundling whose search takes them from a phone box in Lambeth all the way to Florida!
Here's what you need to know about Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace 2023.
Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace 2023 release date
Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace 2023 will begin airing on Monday, June 26 at 9 pm on ITV1. The rest of the series will air over the following two nights.
You can also stream all three episodes on ITVX as a box set.
What will happen in Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace 2023?
The overview for the fifth series of Born Without Trace reads: "Foundlings are people abandoned as babies, often in the first days and weeks of their lives, who until now have been unable to solve the ultimate mystery of their lives — who they are. Born without trace, with no birth record or name, they have had no way of discovering the basic facts of their identity.
But for over five years, the team behind Long Lost Family has combined genetic genealogy with DNA technology to try to help more than thirty foundlings unlock the secrets of their past. All are searching for answers to the most fundamental questions: when’s my birthday; where do I come from; who are my parents and who am I?
Series 5 of this BAFTA award-winning spin-off series features five new foundlings on a quest to find out who they are; from a woman found as a baby in an open-top Aston Martin in Marylebone to a woman left as a newborn in the matron’s room of a hospital, to a baby found on a doorstep at Christmas 1960. For the first time on Born Without Trace, the searches take us across the world with one man whose story began as a baby in a phone box in Lambeth and ends with a whole new family in Florida.
With more relatives found than any previous series, three of our foundlings discover both their parents’ identities and meet siblings on the maternal and paternal side of the family.
As the stories unfold, the viewer is taken on an extraordinary journey through twists and turns worthy of any drama, but presenters Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell reveal information with sensitivity and compassion and always with the support and expertise of the team of social workers behind the scenes."
Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace 2023 - episode overviews
The first episode of the series features Born Without Trace's first international search. Following the death of his adoptive parents, Chris Mason is trying to track down his birth parents, and the search leads them overseas to the United States. There, they try to reunite him with members of both sides of his birth family.
In episode two, we're introduced to Harvey Shackell, a man who who was found on a doorstep in a cardboard box on Boxing Day, 1960. He's looking to track down not only his birth parents, but also Mrs Vera Wood, the woman who had taken him in that evening.
In addition, we also meet Ruth Hale, a woman who was found in the back of an Aston Martin. Her own search for her birth parents has not been fruitful, and the Born Without Trace team are left to try and track down the very same car to see if it can point them in a new direction.
In the third and final episodes, we meet Paul Watts and Caroline Harris-Gray. Paul is a police detective who was discovered on the steps of a North London church in 1964. He has very limited info about his circumstances; he doesn't even know the name of the church in question, though the team are able to track down some more concrete info about his birth.
Caroline Harris-Gray was abandoned at the Prince of Wales Hospital in 1968, but wasn't aware of any coverage of her discovery. Luckily, the search team are able to find a connection back to her family in an online database, allowing her to reconnect with surviving members of her family.
Is there a trailer?
ITV has released a trailer that features all five of the new foundlings featured in the new series. It introduces the stories of each of the five stars and teases some of the discoveries that the Born Without Trace search team stumble upon during the latest series; check it out below.
