Reunited story of sister and brother on TV

The remarkable story of how a woman who was found abandoned as a newborn baby in a telephone box in Dundalk , was reunited with her brother, who was also a foundling, is being told in a two part edition of ITV’s Long Lost Family Special: Born Without a trace.

Helen Ward and her brother David McBride from Belfast tell their moving story on the programme which continues tonight (Tuesday) at 9pm.

Their deeply moving reunion in Carlingford Guesthouse is captured by the ITV show which eventually brought them together.

Helen had previously made the headlines when she made contact with the lorry driver who found her in 1968 after telling her story on Liveline on RTE in March 2010.

Lorry driver Donal Vaughan found her as a baby when he stopped to make a phonecall in Dundalk on the evening of March 9 1968. He was travelling from Belfast to Dublin and as the roads were frosty, he wanted to tell his landlady that he was running late. In the phonebox, he discovered the small baby in a tartan holdall with a bottle of milk and some baby clothes.

He phoned the gardai and the late Sgt Michael Conneally lifted Helen from the phonebox and brought her to the Louth County Hospital.

Helen was adopted by the Ward family in Dublin and although she had a happy childhood, she always wanted to discover the circumstances which had led to her mother abandoning her when she was just a couple of days old.

In 2003 she went to an adoption centre in Drogheda but her birth certificate simply stated ‘child found exposed’.

While her appeal on Liveline in 2012 disclosed some information, she was no closer to learning who her mother was.

Last year, still desperate to find a blood relative, she took a DNA test and submitted it to an online database.

Meanwhile, David, who was about two weeks old when he was left in a tartan bag in a car belonging to the wife of a Belfast doctor in 1962, was also searching for his birth mother.

While the discovery had made the headlines at the time, no one ever came forward and he was adopted by a family in Lisburn.

David, who now lives in Birmingham turned to the press in the hope that his birth mother might come forward. Despite sharing his story on numerous occasions over the years and talking to Kate Adie for her book about foundlings, he never got any clues.

He got in touch with the ITV Long Lost Family show and when the researchers uploaded his DNA to the database, they discovered he had a sibling - Helen.

The brother and sister also discovered that their Catholic mother, who died in 2017, had abandoned them after having an affair with a Protestant married man who had fourteen children. He was 17 years older, and fearing scandal, she had been afraid to keep the children.

Since being united, Helen and David have visited their mother’s grave and made contact with some of their half-siblings.