Grandmother Jocelyn Taylor, who was born profoundly deaf and adopted at 11 months old, had an emotional reunion with her older brother after he had initially missed the messages she sent him when she tracked him down. In ITV's Long Lost Family on Monday, June 20, Jocelyn attempts to find out more about her birth brother after he seemingly ignored her messages on a DNA site.
The man in question, James Ford, was discovered to be a DNA match for her two years previously and Jocelyn, now 67, was determined to find out why he hadn't responded. Earlier this month, the Long Lost Family team dealt with a woman who had been switched at birth, which you can read about here.
Jocelyn, who described her childhood as “good”, commended her adoptive mother for being “brave to take in a deaf baby”. She had previously told her that she’d been left at a children's home when she was just two weeks old. This prompted her to have feelings of guilt and she described how she constantly questioned what she had done to make her birth parents leave her. The small nugget of information that Jocelyn’s adoptive mother did have was that she had a brother.
As soon as she was old enough, Jocelyn began to search for her birth mother and brother. She recalled how she had previously searched for her family in Leeds Library and following a lot of digging, she discovered that her birth mother had already passed away. The intense search allowed Jocelyn to find out her brother’s name - James Pullen. After more than 20 years searching, she had been unable to locate him but around two years ago, Jocelyn joined a DNA database and was delighted to get a sibling match. Despite this, the person on the database had a different name. At the time, Jocelyn thought she was “so close to finding him” but the match, interestingly called James Ford, didn't respond and she then spent the next two years in the dark.
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The Long Lost Family team attempted to track down James Ford. James, who has lived in the south of France for 20 years, got in touch to explain why he didn’t answer any of Jocelyn's messages. Army retiree James, who is married with four children and three grandchildren, changed his name from Pullen to Ford as that was his father's surname.
Chatting to Long Lost Family host Nicky Campbell, James said he had “always known” about Jocelyn. He emotionally told him that their mother could not cope with a second child as she was unmarried and had multiple jobs to make ends meet. “There’s no doubt that my mother would have cherished Jocelyn,” said James. He was doubtful that their mother would have known about Jocelyn’s disability.
James, who himself was on the DNA database searching for his father, hadn’t seen Jocelyn’s messages to him. After seeing a photograph of his ‘new’ sister, he said: “I can’t wait to see her again,” after previously seeing her as a baby. He broke down in tears at the prospect of another meeting.
At the end of the episode when Davina McCall tells Jocelyn about James, she responds: “My dream has come true." And when the presenter shows her a photograph of her birth mother. Jocelyn says: “I never thought I’d see the day."
At the siblings' eventual emotional reunion, James says to Jocelyn: “I do remember holding a baby and that was you.” Jocelyn described how she felt “out of this world” after meeting her brother. The pair continue to build a relationship to this day.
