As tale of family misery emerges from past Mum had it so tough..she was arrested at 12 for shoplifting. Now at last I can forgive her TV Sharon on Who Do You Think You Are?

This wo woman was a doing woman – a hard worker.” Sharo Sharon also discovers her great grandmother Anni Annie went through difficult times.

Lo Looking i nto grandfather James’s back background, she found he was from Lancashire and h his mother Annie had lived in America in a city i in Massachusetts called Fall River.

Sharo Sharon, who shares an eight-bedroom mansion in Los A Angeles with Ozzy, is startled at having an America American great-grandmother.

Hell hole

She w wonders how and why the woman ended up in England living in a tiny house with poor poo sanitation.

Sharon, Sharon who hit the big time as a judge on X Fa Factor with Simon Cowell, Nicole Scherzinger Scherzin and Louis Walsh, says: “I think I’d have taken the next boat back.”

But accounts acc from the time show that few people c could ever afford the fare.

Her fa family was enticed here in search of a better lifeli then found it to be a “hell hole.”

But what w had happened to Annie’s younger sisters and brothers, Margaret, Mary, Elizabeth, Thomas and John in Fall River? Sharon is shown paperwork painting a bleak picture. None of the children lived past the age of two. One of them died after six days.

And at the age of 35 in 1880, Sharon’s greatgreat grandmother Catherine died of the lung disease tuberculosis, then common.

Only Sharon’s great-great grandfather Thomas and his daughter Annie survived their time in Fall River and, as Sharon knows, returned to England.

“They were just people wanting a better way of life, that’s all,” said Sharon. “They were like pioneers, you know, going off to a new world. And then they come here and it’s worse than what they left. Terrible.”

Reflecting on what she found, she said: “All these women in the family suffered, all of them.

“My great grandmother, my grandmother, my great-great grandmother suffered terribly. But they didn’t give up. And I don’t, really.”

Meanwhile in her own family life Sharon is trying to keep them together. She opened about coping with her son Jack’s divorce from actress Lisa Stelly, 32. TV presenter Jack and Lisa have three children aged seven, four and one.

Sharon said: “When this happens in families – and it happens all the time – they have to have the stability somewhere.

“Nana and Papa are still in the same house. Nothing’s going to change.”

And Sharon says that Jack and Lisa have done their best to ensure “all of that nastiness is kept away from the children”.

See Sharon on Who Do You Think You Are? on September 4 at 9pm on BB1.