How I tracked down my lost family after 40 years
John Fisher had just got in from work when the telephone rang. When he picked up the receiver he could scarcely believe his ears. "Hello, I'm your brother Thomas," said the man on the other end of the line.
John, now aged 58, had not seen Thomas since he was a baby. The pair, and a third brother Stephen, had grown up in a troubled family and were separated after being taken into care in 1963.
But John's success in tracking down his long-lost sibling led him to discover he had two other brothers and a sister, and took him on a seemingly endless quest to bring the family together.
Now John, a retired property services manager with Dudley Council, has put pen to paper to reveal his story in a moving new book.
John, of Spring Vale Close, Coseley, vividly remembers the day he received the telephone call which would change his life.
"My initial instinct was simply to start crying, but at the same time to maintain control of my emotions in order to take in what was happening. My mind was awash with thoughts, was this really Thomas? Was someone playing an awful trick on me? I felt at that moment that I needed to confirm to myself that this really was him."
By amazing coincidence, both brothers had been in touch with social services in an attempt to trace each other, with both of them visiting the council offices within a day of each other.
Speaking to the Express & Star, Mr Fisher says: "You can call it spooky, fate or whatever you want.
"But 24 hours after I went into the social services office and left my details, he went in to do the same thing."
Mr Fisher says he was determined to find his family after being without them for so long.
"I'd got my own life, my own children. But I felt there was something missing."
He had wondered what had happened to his younger brother ever since the pair were separated when he was just eight years old and Thomas was 17 months.
His mother Margaret had been committed to a hospital while suffering from mental illness, and his father Josiah reluctantly agreed that he was unable to bring the children up alone.
Despite their problems and their children being taken away, the couple had more children who were also taken into care. After Margaret died from cancer, Josiah married someone else and had another three children.
John remained in contact with his father and Stephen, two years his junior, but it would be decades before he would see Thomas again, later discovering he had been adopted. His book,
Finding Thomas, tells how the pair were reunited at an emotional meeting in the car park of the Apple Tree pub in Roseville, Coseley, 19 years ago, and how they have become close friends since. The following years would be spent trying to trace the other three siblings – Mark, David and Susan – who were born after John, Stephen and Thomas were taken into care.
Susan now lives in Cardiff but the others are in the Black Country – Thomas and David in Dudley, Mark in Wednesbury and Stephen in Sedgley.
John and Stephen's search for their siblings was featured in the Express & Star's sister newspaper The Chronicle in 1989, and the pair employed a genealogist which would eventually see the whole family brought back together in 2007.
The book also tells the harrowing story of John's troubled childhood, which saw another brother and sister die during childhood, as well as a life of abject poverty growing up in a dysfunctional family.
But despite his troubled start in life, John, says there is no aspect of his life he would have changed, as were it not for an extraordinary chain of events which saw him eventually living with his grandmother, he would never have met his wife Diane.
He says: "I went to live with an aunt in 1963 but three years later my father wanted me to move in with him and his mother. But he then moved out and left me with my grandmother.
Living there I went to Bishop Milner School and that's where I met Diane."
In the book he reveals: "She has become the only person in my life I can confide in, share my pain, my thoughts, my disappointments, my joy and elation. She is my life breath."
John says while nothing will ever replace the lost years when the family was apart, meeting his younger siblings has been an immensely rewarding experience and it has been fascinating finding the similarities in their personalities, despite having grown up separately.
"The only unfortunate thing about Thomas is he supports Aston Villa!"
Finding Thomas is available in selected bookshops and through Amazon.
