ITV’s Long Lost Family has some heartbreaking moments but now a brand new spin-off series is set to follow the fate of children ‘stolen at birth’.
In the special spin-off series Long Lost Family: The Spanish Baby Scandal we see the team once again searching for people with heartbreaking tales.
This time, the team investigate the case of people who have come forward believing they or their family may have been taken in Spain, and it looks set to be gripping viewing.
Thousands of people get in touch with Long Lost Family looking for missing loved every year, but something unusual happened last year.
Ruth Appleby got in touch saying she had given birth to her first child, a daughter, in Spain in 1992 and she just vanished.
She said: “I believed for 19 years that my daughter had died. And then, suspicions came to light that my daughter may not have died and was stolen at birth…”
Then another searcher got in touch telling a similar story.
Maria Elena, a Spanish woman living in London, approached Long Lost Family on behalf of her 93-year-old mother Ana.
She said that she and Ana believe that Ana’s twin babies, a boy and a girl born in Madrid in 1958, may have been stolen at birth.
Ruth, Maria Elena and Ana believe their cases are part of a scandal in Spain.
A huge number of women have come forward since 2011 who believe that their babies were taken from them at birth and given – or sold – to others.
It has been well documented in several high-profile court cases of the country’s “stolen babies”, who were snatched from their mothers during the Franco dictatorship.
This harrowing practice began under Gen Francisco Franco and went on for up to 50 years, until the 1990s.
No-one knows how many babies were stolen but victims’ groups estimate that the number taken from their mothers could be as high as 300,000.
The popular Long Lost Family follows heartbreaking cases of children who have no knowledge of who their biological parents can be.
They put their faith in DNA and genealogy tests in a bid to reunite them with their birth relatives.
Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell front the show and provide a shoulder to cry on during the deeply personal moments.
They are assisted by the show’s expert Ariel Bruce who attempts to crack the cases and get to the bottom of a person’s story – no matter how difficult.
The last episode aired on August 25 featured Mary Arbuthnot – a woman looking for two siblings adopted separately.
It also followed the story of Maggie McCauley, who was searching for the older sister her mum were forced to give up.
Long Lost Family airs on ITV on Sunday evenings at 9pm.
