The final episode of the current series of ITV 's Long Lost Family airs on Monday, July 25 and it's heartbreaking. The episode tells the story of a man who was given up for adoption and a mother who stopped at nothing to find her son. Previous episodes shown during this series include the story of two adopted siblings who never knew they existed. You can read more about that here.
This week, in a tragic turn of events, Andrew Barlow, 52, who waited six years to reply to a letter from his birth mother, discovers that she has died. The Long Lost Family team are keen to find out why he didn't reply straight away. Andrew, who lives on the south coast of Australia with his wife and children, was born in the UK and adopted as a baby. “I had a very happy childhood,” he says as he recalls his early years. “I never felt anything but love.” For Andrew, he began to think about his birth family after becoming a father himself.
Desperate to find out where he came from, Andrew used a professional social worker to access his UK adoption file. It was here that he discovered that his birth mother, Patricia Clark, who fell pregnant at 15, refused to sign the adoption papers and never gave up looking for him. Both mother and son, on opposite sides of the world, tried searching for each other but tragically missed their chance to connect.
