This month, Platinum columnist and Loose Women presenter Jane Moore helps a friend uncover past secrets.
WORDS: JANE MOORE. IMAGES: SHUTTERSTOCK, JANE MOORE & VARIOUS BRANDS.
Over the years, I have helped various friends to find loved ones – be it a biological parent or, in one case, the child they were forced to give up for adoption at just 16.
Finding someone’s mother is always a greater challenge than locating a father because, more often than not, the woman goes on to marry and changes her surname.
This was the case when my dear friend Andrew Pierce – who works for the Daily Mail and Good Morning Britain – asked me to find his Irish birth mother Margaret. All he really knew was that he’d lived in a Roman Catholic orphanage in Cheltenham for more than two years and, initially, she visited him regularly. Notes taken at the time suggested she was hoping to keep him, but one day she turned up to tell them that his biological father had been killed in a road accident and she couldn’t do it alone.
Of course, times were very different then, and the prospect of being a devout Catholic and unmarried mother was clearly too much for her. So Patrick – as he was named at birth – was put up for adoption and, at the age of three, taken in by loving adoptive parents Betty and George, who named him Andrew. But as he grew older, he became more curious about his biological roots and, with their full support, set out to find Margaret with my help.
She had a common Irish surname, but most challenging of all was that she’d been extremely economical with the details that form the starting point of any journalistic investigation.
The address she’d given to his carers at the orphanage was the hospital where she worked as a nurse, and I later discovered she had lied about her age – she was 34, not 29.
But I suspected this, so initially spent weeks cross-checking the birth dates of multiple women who would have been within the age range of late 20s to early 30s in 1961, and it yielded multiple potential candidates. I then crosschecked them all on the marriage registers, but there were none I could definitively identify as the right woman.
I thought I had hit a wall by that point, but in the adoption notes, Margaret had mentioned a family connection to farming. So in one last push for the truth, I trawled through various cattle trader gazettes and managed to find two listings with the same surname.
An important call
Trying not to arouse suspicion, I mentally rehearsed a scenario
