Case No. NE21P00484-&-NE21P07404

20.Ms M was born in 1964. Her birth mother was a young woman from an aristocratic family in her early 20s, and was unmarried; it is believed that no one in the birth mother’s family knew at the time of the pregnancy, the birth of the baby, and/or the subsequent adoption. Within two months of her birth, Ms M was placed with substitute parents, and was adopted by them in the spring of the following year. Both of Ms M’s adoptive parents are now in fact deceased. Ms M maintains good relations with her adoptive brother and sister with whom she says she is close. As indicated above (§10), Ms M’s biological mother is still alive, and they made limited contact with each other over 30 years ago. They resumed contact in writing some five years ago and met again in 2021. Ms M’s birth mother rejects, and indeed closes down, any discussion with Ms M about her birth father; she had simply told Ms M that “he was sweet and charming” but little else. All other members of Ms M’s birth family have rejected her, and indicated that they want nothing to do with her, since she made herself known to them in recent years. She says:“As I expect many adopted children feel, I longed to have information about my birth identity and as soon as I was an adult, with the support of my adoptive parents, I began looking for my birth parents. I had my birth certificate, with my mother’s name and I was able to obtain my adoption records, … I found my father’s name and his address at the time in these records.”21.Ms M has spent much of the last 40 years trying to trace her birth father. She started understandably with her adoption records; those had documented the father’s name as ‘BH’, although the records noted that there were various versions of the birth father’s forename and surname, neither of which are English names. ‘BH’ is unfortunately, for Ms M’s purposes, a very common name in the European country of BH’s origin. The Applicant engaged private investigators and tried various other routes to trace her birth father, to no avail. The breakthrough came when Ms M submitted DNA results to a number of genealogy websites searching for matches. In 2020, Ms M was notified that there was indeed a match who could be either a nephew or a half-brother. The man (in fact later identified as a half-brother) named his father on his family tree as ‘BE’. After further online searches Ms M found a number of other members of the wider family who were identified as cousins and siblings; they were all quick to accept that Ms M is indeed a member of their family. Ms M was however “devastated” to discover that the man for whom she had been searching for so many years had in fact died in 2010.22.These researches enabled Ms M to obtain the birth and death certificates of the man she believed to have been her birth father. His full name was recorded ‘BHNE’ (i.e., including the names of BH as Ms M had originally believed, but with ‘E’ as the surname as her half-brother had referred). It transpired that BH had married a woman in 1965 (three months after Ms M’s birth); fortuitously, his marriage certificate recorded his address at the time. Significantly this is/was the same address held on the Barnardo’s adoption file for BH, the man identified in that documentation as Ms M’s birth father. It now appears that BH had altogether 11 children from a number of different relationships. Ms M has now discovered a great deal about BH – he was a brilliant academic, fluent in many languages, a womaniser, an alcoholic, and a gambler; he was also said to be a charming man with “a big heart”.23.In most unusual, but extremely fortuitous, circumstances unconnected with this application (the details of which it is unnecessary to rehearse here), in late October 2021 (after this application had been issued), a bone from the body of BH (buried in his home country in Europe) was exhumed, and Ms M was able to persuade the authorities in that country, with support from BH’s family, to test her DNA against the bone of the deceased. This DNA test confirmed to a very high degree of probability indeed that the deceased (BH) is her birth father. Ms M wishes to take citizenship of the country of BH’s nationality, and has started to form plans to relocate to live in the country of her birth father and his family.24.Ms M movingly describes in her statement how ‘monumental’ finding her birth family has been. In a passage of the evidence which echoes the evidence of Ms L she says this:“I have never ever felt so loved or accepted in my whole life. It was like I had never left… the more I find out about him, the more I can see where certain elements of my personality come from.”