IF you ever need reminding that families are never as simple as they seem, Long Lost Family is the TV show to do it.
The second episode of the latest series, in fact, takes us all over the place, from Scotland to Suffolk to Switzerland, as people hunt for missing links in their family trees.
Samantha, a 44-year-old mother-of-three from Glasgow, longs to share her life with the father she never knew.
“To meet my father now would be a miracle,” she says. “Just to be in my father’s arms, to have him hold me would be like a dream come true.”
On a visit to Zurich, the city where her parents fell in love more than 40 years before, Samantha recounts the events which led to her parents parting.
Her mother, Alexandra, was working in Zurich as a housekeeper when she met Jean Pierre Wandfluh, a young local man, and it was love at first sight.
The romance was to be short-lived as after just a year, Samantha’s mum got news that her own mother was terribly ill.
Upon her return to her native home of Scotland, Alexandra discovered she was pregnant.
When Jean Pierre learnt about this, he wrote to her, asking her to return to Switzerland.
Samantha, not able to leave her mother, raised her daughter in Scotland without Jean Pierre.
Nicky Campbell travels to Biel, Switzerland, to look for Jean Pierre’s nephew, David Wandfluh.
A second story features 57-year-old Vanda James, who lives in Norfolk, not far from where she grew up in Lowestoft, Suffolk.
She is desperate to get to the bottom of a mystery that has haunted her life and cast a shadow over her family — what happened to her baby brother, who disappeared more than 50 years ago.
“It was a secret because nobody spoke of it and finding my brother would put an end to that secret,” she admits.
On a visit to her old house, Vanda recalls an event which took place there when she was a child of six.
She has vivid memories of walking into the living room and seeing a baby.
Nobody ever explained who this baby was or why it was at her house. She never saw the baby again, but the memory stuck with her.
He was her brother, and when Davina McCall finds the child 50 years on, it transpires Vanda’s sibling is now transgender.
When the morning comes for Vanda to meet Debbie, both are full of nerves.
“I feel proud of her and I want to give her a hug as I wasn’t able to the last time I saw her,” says Vanda.
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