Three siblings who met for the primary time of their sixties

When Mary Arbuthnot opened a letter from her dying father, Richard, more than 20 years ago, she had no idea it would change the course of her life.

The sealed, brown envelope with ‘Mary’ on the front contained some paperwork and a note, reading: ‘Alright Queen. If you want to find out any info, here are the numbers. Love always, Mum and Dad.’

One of the phone numbers her father had provided was for a Liverpool adoption agency – a call to them began what turned out to be a long quest to find her birth family.

The agency’s records revealed that Mary’s birth mother was an unmarried Irish woman called Rita O’Reilly, who had been living in London but for some reason travelled to Liverpool for Mary’s birth in 1965 – and that Rita had also given birth to two other children, a girl born in 1960 and a boy born in 1962.

Mary, from West Derby, a suburb of Liverpool, was stunned.

‘I’d known since I was seven that I was adopted as a ten week-old baby, but I’d had such a great childhood with my brother, who was also adopted, that I never thought any more of it.’

So happy was she, that she had often yearned for other siblings. Now she was left overwhelmed by the news she actually had two she’d never met.

Named Bridget and George, they were born in London. And, like her, they had been adopted, each to a different family. Unusually, they shared the same father, an Irishman called Jim Melody.

‘I was so shocked. It was a strange feeling because I’ve had a happy life, but there was always this thing that something was missing,’ says Mary, 58.

Meeting her brother and sister, she felt, would make her life complete.

That same year, 2002, she spoke to a counsellor at the Nugent Adoption agency, who was able to give her some more information about her birth parents and siblings.

It threw up a mix of emotions.

Mary had always imagined her birth mother as a vulnerable teenager, forced by poverty or family disapproval to give up her baby.

‘Back in the Sixties, it would have been hard under those circumstances,’ says Mary, 58.

Instead, she discovered that her mother was 34 when she had given birth to her and had already given two babies away.

‘That didn’t sit well with me. I’m not angry at all, I just can’t fathom how any woman can give a whole family away. She was offered help by the Church but still chose to give us away.’

For the first time, Mary began to have doubts about trying to find her brother and sister: would they even want to be found?

‘Did they know about me and, if so, why hadn’t they come searching?’ she says. ‘Part of me thought that if I started looking and they didn’t want to be involved, I’d be sorry.’

For the time being, Mary – busy with her career as a hairdresser and her role as a mother to Stephanie, now 38, and Richard, now 30 – put the search out of her mind.

Then, three years later, her father died.

That loss seemed to trigger an even more powerful longing for the siblings she had never met. She found herself glued to the heartbreaking stories of adoption and reunion on ITV’s Long Lost Family, the programme that reunites relatives separated by adoption.

In 2022, after yet another tear-jerking episode – and a full 20 years since her father had given her the letter – Mary finally decided to take a chance. She filled out an application to the show and then, as life got busy, almost forgot about it.

Five months later, she received an unexpected phone call.

‘It was one of the Long Lost Family team who wanted to ask some more questions. I nearly dropped the phone!’ she says.

Because she had her siblings’ dates of birth, the team was able to make a quick breakthrough.

They found her brother George and sister Bridget – who was now called Andrea. Not only were they both alive and well, but were living just 40 miles apart from one another, 240 miles south of Mary.

In an upcoming episode of the series, co-host Davina McCall breaks the news to Mary at her home in Liverpool.

‘It was just unbelievable,’ Mary recalls. ‘It was a life-changing moment, that’s the only way I can explain it. I started shaking because even though I’d known about them, it was another thing to actually be told “we’ve found them”.’

George and Andrea, meanwhile, were dealing with their own sense of shock after each receiving a letter from Long Lost Family explaining they had a sister who was trying to trace them.

Andrea Tovey, 64, a former civil servant from Gillingham in Kent, initially thought the letter was a scam.

‘I was a bit suspicious. It was just such a shock to get a letter saying my sister was wanting to find me when I never knew I had one,’ the mum of two admits.

It was even more of an ‘unbelievable, wonderful shock’ to be told that she also had a brother.

Today, as the three of them speak, there is an undeniable ease and warmth between them.

They fall into a casual, comfortable patter as if they’ve known each other for decades, not months.

With similar laid-back demeanours and endearingly gentle laughs, only Mary’s soft Liverpudlian accent gives away the fact the trio didn’t grow up together.

As Mary jokingly cuts across from George as he proudly claims responsibility for the reunion – he had been looking for his two sisters for more than four years and was just days away from finding them himself before Long Lost Family got in touch – you can see they have already developed that unmistakable knack for jovial sibling bickering.

They chuckle about the obvious physical similarities: ‘We are all very pale,’ laughs Mary, ‘and if you look at the shape of our eyes and mouths I think it’s the same’.

Unlike Mary, both George and Andrea were raised as only children.

Born in Highgate, London, and raised in Gillingham, Andrea had always known she was adopted. Like Mary, she had a blissfully happy childhood, brought up principally by her father, Leonard, after her adoptive mother Betty died of cancer when she was just six.

Andrea had pulled her birth records as a young adult, but as she was the first child to be born to Rita O’Reilly, there was no mention of a younger brother or sister.

Life was busy and fulfilling and she decided not to chase after her parents in case they weren’t interested in meeting.

Born in Hackney and raised in Loughton, Essex, George Buttwell, 62, had also known he was adopted as long as he could remember. Like his sisters, he had a happy childhood, leaving him with little urgency to uncover his past.

In 1998, his wife, Lesley, saw a programme about accessing adoption records, which piqued steel fixer George’s interest. He applied for his adoption paperwork and original birth certificate, which provided brief details about his birth parents.

But it was really only years later – in 2019 – that his search got going. George’s youngest daughter, Lindsey, 34, bought him a DNA test as a gift. The results opened a new chapter, throwing up relatives he never knew he had in Ireland and London. He began to discover more about his past than he had ever imagined.

George’s DNA test linked him to a second cousin in Ireland and through him and another member of his extended family, he heard he had two sisters for the first time.

‘Knowing that, I became determined to find them,’ says the father of three.

He then decided to explore a hunch that his sisters might have been born at the same Catholic nursing home in London as him. St Margaret’s no longer existed, but he was told he might be able to find out more about his sisters through the Catholic Children’s Society in Westminster. Its records contained the full names and dates of birth for his sisters.

His local council adoption service agreed to contact his sisters on his behalf and was just doing some final legal checks when the letter arrived from Long Lost Family.

‘I’d been looking for four years by that stage. I told [the adoption service] to call off the search. It was amazing news – but perhaps not as much of a surprise as it was to Andrea, who didn’t know about either of us.’

Last November, the three siblings finally came face-to-face in a Liverpool hotel in emotional scenes which will be broadcast tonight.

As Davina explains as they wait to meet: ‘It is very rare for Long Lost Family to find and bring together three full siblings all of whom – until today – have been complete strangers to one another.’

Andrea was first in the room; her heart in her mouth.

‘It actually felt like quite a while before they came in and I started getting emotional before,’ she recalls. ‘It was something I’d never believed could happen after all this time but it was so nice. We held hands as we talked and we just seemed to get on straight away.’

George agrees. ‘It did feel like we were all family. You could feel that straight away – that we’ve got this thing in common, no matter how far we’ve drifted.’

Now, though, the sibling bond appears to be growing stronger with every passing month. They have an official family WhatsApp Group – called O’Reilly Melody after the surnames of their birth parents.

In January, less than two months after the show, they came together again at George’s Essex home, where a picture of the three of them now takes pride of place in the living room.

A second reunion followed in June, with a pub lunch in London and another trip to George’s house to share notes on their histories and meet extended family.

Just this week, George’s daughter Sarah, 38, flew in from Spain and Andrea was there to meet her.

Small things mean a lot: for Mary, it’s been a thrill to send birthday and Christmas cards to her brother and sister for the very first time.

The growing bond feels so natural that Mary has even taken to cutting Andrea’s hair.

‘Every time I’ve seen her she’s blow-dried my hair and last time she actually cut it. I’ve never looked so glamorous,’ smiles Andrea.

But for all the joy of getting to know one another (Andrea even jokes she shares the same love for the TV detective, Columbo, as George) there is sadness for the missed years they could have had together.

‘I know that my parents would have adopted the other two if they’d have known and we could have all been together, as we should have been,’ says Mary.

The siblings have discovered that Jim Melody passed away around 20 years ago and Rita O’Reilly around ten years later. As they were unmarried, Jim was buried in Ireland and Rita in Finchley, North London. From what they have gathered from relatives, the siblings understand that Rita and Jim lived together on and off for 40 years, but the real nature of their relationship remains a mystery: the pair have taken to the grave many unanswered questions for Mary, Andrea and George.

‘For the time they were living in, for their background, it would have made a lot of sense to get married, so why didn’t they?, George, who has visited his mother’s grave, has often wondered.

Why did their mother have them adopted, and to different families? And why, when Rita and Jim appeared to travel from Dublin to London together, did Rita keep leaving their London address and flitting to different areas?

For now at least, the unresolved questions are overshadowed by the joy of finding one another.

‘I’ve got ideas of what I’d like to do if I get to the point of retiring, but this has given me this extra positive feeling. It’s this happy unknown future now and there’s already this genuine love there with us,’ says Andrea.

‘It’s a feeling you can’t really describe because it’s something I’ve never experienced before,’ says Mary. ‘It was like I’d already known them forever.’

• Episode six of Long Lost Family airs on ITV1 and ITVX on August 25th, at 9pm.