Long Lost Family: Born Without a Trace's emotional final episode investigates the case of a baby abandoned in hospital
The final episode of Long Lost Family: Born Without a Trace is another weepie.
This season of emotional documentary series Long Lost Family comes to an end tonight with the puzzling story of a baby girl abandoned by her mother at the hospital where she was born.
Each of the three special episodes of Long Lost Family: Born Without a Trace on ITV this week have focused on the often heartbreaking stories of foundlings –people who were abandoned as babies, sometimes in the first few hours of their lives.
Presenters Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell, and the Long Lost Family team have used the latest genetic genealogy and DNA testing technology to help the foundlings – including a man who was left in public toilets near a football stadium and a woman found more than 70 years ago on a train luggage rack at Paddington Station – to find their birth families.
Often the team don’t even have a name or record of the baby’s birth to help their investigation. However, the final episode features the story of Sarah Dunkley who does have a birth record, as well as the name of her mother and a description of her written down by one of the nurses at the hospital when Sarah was born.
Sarah’s mother disappeared the day after she gave birth, and Sarah spent years trying to find out more about who her mother is and why she abandoned her. Unfortunately, the name and addresses (one in Paris and one in London) her mother gave to the hospital turned out to be false, so Sarah turned to Long Lost Family for help.
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“I would just love to know why she left me, but it just seems an impossible puzzle,” Sarah says in the documentary.
The hospital records included a note that her mother had given birth two and a half years previously, meaning that Sarah has a sibling. A DNA search by Long Lost Family reveals a sister who was also abandoned, and further investigation by the team lead Sarah to the answers she is so desperate for.
“There’s a connection there somewhere, to the address in London, to the address in Paris, there are so many ifs, buts and maybes, it’s just mind-blowing,” she says.
“It would be amazing to know what happened, that hopefully somewhere somebody could be able to tell me and put an end to the mystery.”
The final part of Long Lost Family: Born Without A Trace airs tonight on ITV at 9pm. To find out what else is on, check out our TV Guide.
