At just two weeks old, Joselyn Taylor was abandoned at a children’s home, left to grow up asking herself why and deciding it must be because she was deaf.
But now, at the age of 68, she has traced her brother James, 73, and discovered the real reason her mother had to give up her baby daughter.
James says: “She couldn’t cope with both of us. She was unmarried, she had two or three jobs sometimes to keep food on the table.”
And in answer to the question that had haunted Joselyn her whole life, he said his mother would not have known she was deaf before giving her up at two weeks.
James says: “Not being that little. No way.”
Joselyn ended up being adopted by a single mum who ran a sweet shop.
She had a happy childhood, educated in a specialist school for deaf children.
She found out she had a brother when her adoptive mum Kathleen told her that her birth mother had once turned up at the sweet shop, asking for money with a five-year-old boy in tow.
Joselyn says: “She was obviously very, very poor. My adoptive mother told her to get out of the shop.”
But Joselyn, from Boston Spa, West Yorks, realised she must have a brother and started to hunt for him.
She says: “I was very naughty. I went into my adoptive mum’s bedroom drawer, trying to find information. And I did find some paperwork.”
On it was the name of her brother, James Sydney Pullman.
But when Joselyn put her DNA on a web database, and it revealed a brother called James Ford.
The different surname confused her, and her attempts to contact James went unanswered.
She says: “I wasn’t upset. I just felt a little bit deflated.”
Then Joselyn turned to ITV show Long Lost Family for help, and Davina McCall and the team found James in Carcassonne, France.
Joselyn and James, whose mother Lois Pullman was dead, were reunited.
Joselyn says: “I felt an instant connection – he cried, he really cried. It was lovely.” Joselyn found she and James had a lot in common.
She says: “We’re both very mischievous. It’s very strange when you haven’t been around that person and that’s what they’re like, as well. It’s funny.”
Long Lost Family, ITV tonight, 9pm.
