“It was my last chance” Long Lost Family reunites Newcastle mam with daughter after 62 years apart | Chronicle Live

Having kept a photo of her beside for over six decades and hoped that one day they might meet again, a Newcastle mam was finally reunited with a daughter she gave up for adoption at just eight weeks old, as emotional scenes played out on Thursday night’s Long Lost Family. And an elated Avril Scott told ChronicleLive that as soon as they shared their first hug they ‘weren’t strangers anymore.’

If you’ve ever watched just a single episode of Long Lost Family, you’ll know that’s it’s highly emotionally charged from start to finish and Avril’s episode proved to be no different, with it beginning with the now 77-year-old Newcastle native talking about how she fell pregnant after meeting a boy at a dance, was taken out of school at seven months pregnant and sent away to a mother and baby home in Carlisle where she gave birth to a little girl she named Michelle, after the famous Beatles song.

Avril had her daughter for eight weeks before she was adopted and, while she went onto have another daughter, Sharon, she never ever forgot about Michelle and, having held onto hope that she’d one day see her again or, at the very least, find out that she’d gone onto have a great life, Avril saw Long Lost Family as ‘her last chance’ to have the outcome she so badly wanted.

Speaking to The Chronicle before sitting down to watch Thursday’s show and explaining how and why she took the leap of faith to try and track down her baby girl after all this time, Avril said: ‘I was watching the television one evening, I switched it over and the end of Long Lost Family came on. I’m getting old, I’m nearly 78 now. I was running out of time to ever be able to find my child.

“I thought, right I’ll give it one last attempt, so I sent an email to Long Lost Family and from there on in, it was just a rollercoaster ride.”

A photo of Avril in her younger days(Image: ITV/Long Lost Family)

Avril’s journey to being reunited with her daughter, a now 62-year-old who was renamed Eleanor, saw her having to relive some heart wrenching memories, not least when she was taken to the mother and baby home, which has since been converted into flats but she instantly recognised from its staircase.

“I was very hesitant,” she explained. “But I knew that I had to go through the process, not only to find Michelle (Eleanor), but also for myself, to help me deal with the past and, without the team, who took me where I had to go and helped me and gave me all the support you could possibly need, I wouldn’t have got through it. I knew I had to do it.

“Yes, it was upsetting and traumatic but, of course, it was worth it.”

It was Long Lost Family’s famous host Davina McCall who headed up to Newcastle to meet Avril, while, after the show’s team of experts worked their magic, Eleanor, whose adoptive parents died when she was in her 20s, was tracked down to Essex, where she was visited by Davina’s colleague Nicky Campbell.

But, other than the crew, there was nobody else in the room when the mother and daughter, having both been moved to tears on being handed a recent photo of one another, came face to face for the first time in 62 years and greeted each other with a hug that you could feel meant so much to both of them.

Eleanor (MIchelle) as a baby(Image: ITV/Long Lost Family)

On getting to have both of her daughters in her life now and develop their own close bond with each other, Avril, who predicted she’d be left in fl;ood at tears as she sat down yo watch her episode, added: “Long Lost Family have made all my wishes come true. There are no words to describe it; we just hugged each other so tightly and there was an instant bond there.

“Not that either of us can understand it, because basically you’re strangers, but as soon as I put my arms around her, we weren’t strangers anymore. Eleanor’s been up to Newcastle and she’s part of my family now; we all fit like a jigsaw.”