Long Lost Family’s biggest tearjerker Davina found my relatives after 50yrs but Mum had just died

WHEN Maria Roberts wanted to trace her birth mother 50 years after she was given up for adoption, she turned to TV’S Long Lost Family.

And Davina Mccall’s Bafta-winning show managed to find Maria’s real family, despite them being in another country. The nursery nurse, 52, was thrilled to discover they were 1,500 miles away from her home in Penzance, Cornwall – in Cassino, central Italy.

But the reunion with her blood relatives was incredibly bittersweet for Maria, who had been desperate to meet her birth mum.

She found out that the young woman who had reluctantly given her up in tragic circumstances more than half a century ago had died only last year.

So Maria was unable to tell mum Gilda Constantino she empathised with her tragic plight and didn’t blame her for what had happened.

But she did learn all about the circumstances of her birth and met a new set of relatives.

In the emotional show, to be aired on Tuesday, Davina will reveal that poor Gilda’s fiancé was killed in a car accident before Maria was born.

Secretly pregnant in 1960s Italy – when the Catholic Church strongly disapproved of single mothers – Gilda was left with little option but to give up her baby daughter.

So at just 22, frightened, alone and grieving for her fiancé, Gilda travelled to England to give birth. She took her secret to the grave. Mum-of-two Maria told the Sunday People: “When I heard she’d died, my heart sank. I wish I’d started searching for her sooner.

“I’d have loved to have met her. There are still so many questions unanswered. We don’t know where she got pregnant, why she never went on to have more children, why she never told anyone.”

But Maria has now forged an unbreakable bond with her long-lost cousin, who has gifted her a ring that once belonged to Gilda.

Maria said: “Nobody in the family knew of my existence until doing Long Lost Family. My mother never told anyone.

“My cousins were crying when they met me, they were full of emotion.

“I feel like a completely different person now. It’s given me a newfound confidence. Now I know why I look they way I do.

“All the things I hated about myself – my short body, my wide knees – they are all the same as my mum. Now I love them.”

Maria had grown up full of resentment for her unknown birth mother, despite her adoptive parents Eileen and Jack Finnelly encouraging her to ask questions.

“When I was younger I resented being given away,” she said. “My attitude was, ‘She didn’t want

me and threw me away.’ That’s how a teenager’s mind works.” Later, she felt tracing her biological family would be a betrayal to Eileen and Jack, who she “idolised”. But in 2003, after they had both passed away, Maria – mum to Jodie, 25, and Jack, 20 – wanted answers. She said: “I always wondered who I looked like and who my children look like, as they don’t look like their father or me. I’d go to the doctors and they’d ask me about my family history and I didn’t know.” After trying to trace them via social services and the Home Office, she contacted the ITV show, hosted by Davina and Nicky Campbell. Producers of the tearjerker, which gets 2.6m viewers, traced Gilda to the small town of Cassino, halfway between Rome and Naples. It was there they learned she may have been swayed by religious pressures to give up her baby – and that she had died.

Maria was rocked by the devastating news after being told off-camera. But she said: “On the other side of the coin, if she’d been alive I’d have had to go through another bereavement and I don’t know how I’d have coped.”

Gilda had never married, had no other children, and all her siblings had died. But Maria shared an emotional meeting with her older cousin Silvana in her mother’s home town.

She said: “My cousin wouldn’t let go of my hand and kept saying ‘bellissimo’.

“She was stroking my hands saying they were the same as my mum’s. They told me how I looked like her. Mum loved to dance, so do I. It felt great to have that connection.

“One Italian cousin has a son of the same age as mine and they shared the same mannerisms.”

Now Maria continues to search for her biological father’s family, who the show was unable to trace. And she will stay close to her Italian family.

She said: “We talk via Whatsapp and Facebook every day. There is a language barrier so we use Google translate. It’s great fun.

“I wanted to find my birth mother to get clarification. Now I know who I am and that’s such an amazing feeling. A big void has been filled.”

Long Lost Family ITV Tuesday 9pm.