A woman who went searching for two twin sisters she’d never met has made a series of shocking discoveries along the way.
Born in Paddington in 1970, Melanie Mackney was lucky to be adopted into a loving family but spent years trying to find out more about her two sisters who were also given up by their mother a year earlier.
The 53-year-old now lives in Hemel Hempstead and admits she was put off having children after discovering the details of her birth mother’s difficult life.
In 1967 her Yugoslavian mother Maria fled Australia to London and soon struck up a relationship with an Irish man.
The couple, who were homeless, went on to have Kathleen and Rosemary in 1969, but were eventually forced to give up the twins after just a few months.
‘It’s quite obvious she was struggling and it put me off having children of my own in a way. I did want to have children, but I suppose in me, I thought “will I be the kind of mother Maria was?”,’ she shares on tonight’s episode of Long Lost Family, who she turned to for help.
‘I want to know what happened to them [the twins].’
Despite doing her best to track down her sisters after the death of her adopted mother when she was 25, Melanie hadn’t been successful in her search over the subsequent 27 years.
After asking the team behind the ITV series for help, she was left floored by several revelations.
After fleeing war-torn Yugoslavia, Maria first migrated to Australia, where she married and had two daughters, Helen and Mitza.
However, Maria, who was later suspected of suffering from schizophrenia, then disappeared and was never seen by her family there again.
After discovering she had two sisters in Australia, Melanie was able to connect with them and see a photograph of her mother for the first time.
Speaking to her sister Mitza on the show, Melanie says she feels ‘such sadness’ for the circumstances of their mother’s life.
But when it came to her two sisters living in the United Kingdom, she was struck with the devastating news Kathleen had died aged 52 in a road accident in 2021.
Speaking before finding out the details of what happened to her two sisters here, Melanie said she was hoping to get ‘peace and comfort’ with an update on their lives.
However the news of Kathleen’s fate, which she was told of off screen, came after Melanie was also told that Maria had died destitute when she was just 43 years old.
However, in tonight’s episode of the series, Melanie is able to reconnect with not only her surviving sisters, but another close family member, her nephew Liam.
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Long Lost Family airs Mondays at 9pm on ITV.
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