Heather Bellamy spoke with Arthur Wakelin about his search to find his birth father and his surprise discovery of a brother and sister.

Arthur: Quite well, looking back. My mum was obviously seeing him before they got married and I was part of their courtship. He then became our father figure. I've got photographs of us together and I'm looking up to him quite admiringly so I rather fancy we got to know each other quite early on.

Heather: And did brothers and sisters come along?

Arthur: They did. I've got a sister, Christine and another sister who was born some fourteen years after I was.

Heather: At what point did you know the situation with your birth father?

Arthur: I didn't find anything out until I was about 17. I used to cycle to work at Crewe and I remember something coming to mind about a photograph of my mums wedding being on the sideboard in the living room and it was no longer there. That got my curiosity going because I remembered being on the photograph. I was going out with a young lady from Sandbach at the time and we had this conversation. She'd been adopted as a child and so I went home and I mulled it over. I sought the photograph out and as I found the photograph my mum said, 'We were going to tell you'. She sought of appeared to me rummaging through a box of photographs and that's how I found out. That wasn't a good moment.

Heather: So, until that moment you'd actually thought your step-dad was your dad?

Arthur and his long lost brother

Arthur: Absolutely. Yes. Absolutely.

Heather: So how did that affect your life?

Arthur: Initially I stormed out of the house in complete anger. I must have rode miles on a pushbike. I got back in when it had turned midnight and they were still waiting up. I was ok eventually and I had no thought of finding out about my birth father until a few years later. When I started going out with my wife we went to Somerset House in London, not to look at the sights in London, but to look up the birth records. I found my fathers birth name, Stanley Buckhannon. I then left it a bit and then I went to Social Services in Crewe. They weren't very helpful at all. They said it isn't worth doing this, you don't want to do this, it'll cause hurt and pain and I thought that's it, forget it. Then I went to Cliff College in 1991 to do some studying and I met a lady there who had an adopted daughter and she helped her daughter find her birth parents, through an agency called NORCAP in Oxford. I tried that route and we found the marriage certificate of my mum and dad.

Then a couple of years ago in the course of my ministry I did a funeral visit in Norton and this lady said to me, 'We could be related'. I said, 'Go on, try me.' She said, 'The name Wakelin appears in our family tree.' I said, 'Well, that's fine, but my birth name was Buckhannon.' She had got the right Wakelin family; we're third cousins removed or something daft like that. I said to her, 'How did you go about this?' She said that it started through Genes Reunited, which is a sister site of Friends Reunited.

I went on Genes Reunited and started to build a family tree. When you start doing family research it becomes slightly addictive, because no matter what else you've got to do, you start doing this because you want to know more. I put in my birth fathers name as Stanley Buckhannon, went and had my tea and when I went back to the computer it flagged up this person who had also got Stanley Buckhannon in their family tree. There must by loads of Stanley Buckhannon's and I had to think about what to do, because up to this point I had been doing it free and it said, 'Would I like to contact?' I said yes and I did this little note and they said they wanted a fee off me. I thought I'd spent quite a bit of money trying to find my birth father already and I hadn't got anywhere. I decided I'd do it though and paid online and I sent this message and she sent a message back, 'Yes, my birth father is Stanley Buckhannon; yes he did live in Liverpool'. We exchanged a few notes and I said, 'Look, this is a bit silly, I'm on the internet as well, can't we do it by email?' So we started doing it by email and she sent some photographs. I'm looking at these photographs and I'm doing all this in one evening, going backwards and forwards. I don't know what time it was in Australia, but she was staying up to do all this and I didn't know then, but this was my sister.

I got these photographs and showed them to Muriel and she said, 'Don't build your hopes up, keep your feet on the ground.' I said, 'I am'. She said, 'No you're not, you're rushing at it.'

There was one photograph of my birth father that she had sent and on a computer you can download it. I scanned one of my son and I put them together and there was a likeness.

She must have then informed her brother of the connection I had made and he hadn't a clue about me. He emailed me his phone number and we had a conversation over the phone and Muriel's just saying to me, 'Just keep your feet on the ground. This might all be not it'.