A YouTuber who was born at St Thomas’ Hospital in London has had a successful ending to his quest to celebrate his 30th with someone who shares his exact birthday and birthplace.
Max Fosh, who has more than four million followers on YouTube, turned 30 on April 3 and decided to pursue the “tiny needle in a massive haystack” challenge to bring in the big day in style.
Initially having a few teething problems because of being unable to access medical records thanks to general data protection regulation (GDPR) rules, his endeavour saw a breakthrough after he appeared on Capital and BBC Radio 1.
He was contacted by a newspaper archivist called Andrew Frost who suggested the two look for birth announcements in newspapers.
“This guy called Andrew is amazing because his dad started collecting all of the national newspapers every day that go out nationally in the UK and he has this warehouse that has about a quarter of a million newspapers over the last 200 years,” Max told the PA news agency.
“He suggested this idea of looking for birth announcements in newspapers and so I went over to his warehouse and he pulled out newspapers from April 1995, around the time I was born.
“After a bit of digging we were able to find an individual called Lily Hunter, who in the newspaper it said was born in St Thomas’ Hospital on April 3 1995, the same day I was, so for the first time in the search I had the name of somebody.”
With a name, Max turned to various social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
After “painstakingly” going through hundreds of names, he found a Lily Hunter on LinkedIn whose education dates lined up perfectly with his and who even attended schools in London.
“She had an email address for her work, so I sent her an email which then gave me an out of office response, but on the bottom of her out of office was a work number so I gave her a call when she returned back to work,” Max added.
“I asked her whether it was her and she said it was and she was incredibly confused, she thought it was a scam.
“I explained who I was and sent her newspaper articles on what I’d been doing and I managed to convince her I wasn’t crazy and said: ‘Hey, I’ve booked a room at St Thomas’ on our birthday if you want to come along for 10 minutes, that would be amazing, so we could have a reunion’.”
Ms Hunter accepted Max’s offer and the two celebrated the end of their 20s by munching on British delicacies including Monster Munch and a Colin the Caterpillar cake while wearing party hats and speaking about their lives since their births at the hospital.
He said having a successful end to his mission felt “satisfying” and he was pleasantly surprised so many people were interested in what he was doing.
He added: “The gmail we set up for people to get in touch if they shared my birthday led to us getting a lot of spam.
“That was quite hard to cut through to work out which leads to follow but people were really quite interested in this idea and went nuts with it.
“I got signed up to a lot of things, my favourite one was when someone signed me up to a daily horse of the day fact, so I got a load of facts about horses, which was quite fun.”
Max shared the good news with his YouTube followers on Sunday: https://www.youtube.com/@MaxFosh
