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Man from Wigan discovers long lost family members on ITV show
He was reunited with his half-siblings after his mother was forced to give him up at birth
A man from Wigan was miraculously reunited with long lost family members as part of an award-winning ITV reality series.
Fifty-two-year-old Roy Sibblies appeared on Long Lost Family this week to track down his biological mother, who was forced to give him up as a baby.
The truck driver grew up in Wigan believing his father’s wife Joan was his real mother, before finding out his birth mother – a woman named Janet – had left him for his dad to raise when he was a baby in 1969.
During the episode, an emotional Roy finds out that a nineteen-year-old Janet had been forced to give him up by her white family due to social attitudes at the time – his father, Eccleston, was Jamaican, and he was a mixed-race baby, something her parents disapproved of.
ITV
Roy said upon finding out Janet’s heartbreaking reason: “To give a baby up because of…the colour of their skin…That cuts really, really deep to the core.
“It’s important for me to know whether she regrets her decision.”
Sadly, Roy later found out that Janet had passed away in 2019, but the team at ITV were able to find that she had two other children, both of whom were living in Worthing, East Sussex, and had always known about Roy.
His step-siblings, Dan and Jo, recalled their mother always telling everyone she had three children, with them claiming she would even commemorate his birthday each year.
ITV
Dan recalled on the show: “While we knew of Roy’s existence, never in a million year did we think we’d have the opportunity to meet him.”
Jo tearfully added: “Mum had a conversation with me that she’d have a baby when she was nineteen but that she wasn’t able to keep him.
“On Roy’s birthday every year she used to say ‘Happy birthday, I wonder what he’s doing’. She would say she had three children when people asked her how many she had.
“Mum always got so upset when she spoke about him because it was her biggest regret that she wasn’t able to keep him.”
ITV
The siblings eventually met in an emotional reunion, with Roy saying he felt ‘every emotion that you can think of running through me.’
He said: “I hope her [Janet’s] spirit is around to feel the love, even though I’ve never seen her, the love I have for her. All the fears that I had all disappeared. I felt like my birth mother was there.”
In an emotional moment for all three siblings, Jo presented Roy with the photographs Janet had kept all these years.
Roy said: “Seeing those photos, that hurt. But a nice hurt, because that meant my mother had kept them for whole of her life. It’s just absolutely amazing.”
Long Lost Family airs tonight at 9pm on ITV.