57-Year-Old Andy Hallsworth Learns His Mother Is Alive More Than Half a Century After Being Left Behind as a Baby – Photos

He spent most of his life not knowing his real birthday. He did not know the names of the people who brought him into the world, or the full story of how a baby boy came to be found on the steps of a London church one autumn morning in 1965.

At 57, he finally got his answers. And some of them, he never saw coming.

Andy Hallsworth, a zookeeper from Norfolk, appeared on "Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace" in 2022, searching for the birth parents who left him behind before he could walk.

The episode, which first aired three years ago, has since found a new wave of viewers, only now discovering his story. The search for his origins would lead him to Ireland, to a stranger's doorstep, and to a conversation that changed everything.

The Question He Never Thought to Ask

Andy had a happy childhood with his adoptive parents and later said he "never really thought about the whole being adopted, it didn't bother me."

But when his wife fell pregnant with their first child, doctors asked for his medical history. For the first time, Andy sat down with his adoptive parents to talk properly about his beginnings.

His father was visibly upset as he told him the truth: that Andy had been found as a baby on the steps of a church. Andy did not even have a birth certificate at that point. "I don't even know if the 31st August is my birthday, who found me, anything," he said. "Would love to know all of that, but I don't."

With those questions still unanswered, Andy reached out to Long Lost Family for help. As part of the search, he was taken to the place where he was believed to have been found: St Mary of the Angels on Sutherland Place in Bayswater, London.

Standing outside, Andy said he was certain he had found the right place. The only information he had ever held onto was that his original name was David Sutherland and that he had been discovered somewhere on or near the steps of a building in Sutherland Place, which was where his surname had originated.

To be standing there in person, he said, felt deeply surreal, knowing it was most likely the very spot where his mother had placed him and walked away.

He said the image of his mother making her way down that same road stayed with him. The church itself was a beautiful one, he noted, and he believed she had chosen it with care, picking somewhere she felt certain a passer-by would find her baby and make sure he was safe.

The Date That Told a Different Story

Then came a discovery that shifted the entire timeline.

The Long Lost Family researchers located a birth certificate confirming Andy had been born in August 1965. But it also showed he had not been found until the 22nd of October 1965. Nearly two months after his birth.

"That's amazing, but that means I was with my mum... that means she looked after me for two months," an emotional Andy said.

He said it was impossible not to think about what that period must have been like for her, carrying the weight of that decision from the moment he was born in August all the way through to October, when she finally let him go.

That, he said, could not have been anything other than an enormous thing to carry.

Still, nothing in the search had prepared Andy for what came next.

Sitting across from the interviewer, he heard the words delivered quietly:

"Your mum is still alive."

He went still. Then, "That's brilliant. That's brilliant."

Before he delved into anything else, he asked just one question. "Did she stay with my father?"

The interviewer nodded.

"They stayed together? All that time? Wow. So for some reason, they couldn't bring me up. Do you know anything about that?"

Two Irish Catholics and an Impossible Decision

The interviewer explained what the research had uncovered.

Andy's birth parents were both from strict Irish Catholic families. They had fallen in love, and when his mother fell pregnant, they wed quietly when she was already five or six months along and before the pregnancy was visible to anyone around them.

They then went to England to conceal the pregnancy, and Andy was born at the Whittington Hospital in North London. When told which hospital, Andy's reaction was immediate:

"Oh, I know where that is.Well, I used to drive past it on my way to work every day."

His parents cared for him for the first six weeks of his life. Returning to Ireland with a baby born so soon after the wedding would have been, as the programme described it, a "social disgrace." And so they left him at the back of St Mary of the Angels church and went home.

"And Did I Have Any Brothers and Sisters?"

There was one more question Andy had to ask.

"And did I have any brothers and sisters?"

The interviewer nodded again.

"What? That's amazing news. So mum and dad stayed together and had more children after me? Things were different then. And, you know, they had to do what they had to do."

He was, in fact, the eldest of eight children. His parents had gone on to raise seven other children together, in the very community that had once made keeping their firstborn impossible.

The Journey to Ireland

Andy's birth mother, then 82, agreed to meet him, though she chose not to appear on camera. The reunion was filmed privately, away from the crew.

Afterwards, Andy said she had been open about the pain the decision had caused her, but that there had been no other way. Learning that both she and his father had quietly wondered about him throughout their lives, he said, meant everything.

"It was so nice to tell her I had a happy childhood."

His father had passed away in 2009, but he visited his grave. Leaving Ireland, Andy said he finally knew who he was and where he had come from. He could not have asked for more.

The episode drew an immediate outpouring of feeling from viewers. Many were particularly struck by one detail: that his parents had stayed together and raised seven more children, while Andy had grown up not knowing any of them.

"Knowing that they stayed together but didn't keep him hurt deeply, you can see the pain his eyes 😢,[sic]" one viewer wrote.

Others put themselves in his birth mother's position across all those years. "I can't imagine the mother's feelings when she finds out her first son is alive and doing well. The number of times she must've thought about him over those years!!"

The full weight of what faith and family expectation had taken from all of them was not lost on viewers. "That's really heartbreaking," one wrote. "To know that your parents stayed together and had more children but gave you up because of the religious edicts of their home town. Just wow!"

"OMG!!! what's a thing to find out and how sad that this had to happen to their family 🫀[sic]" wrote another. And one more, without adding anything further: "They stayed together and had more children, how painful 😭"

Fifty-seven years of not knowing his real identity. The search, in the end, handed him the one thing he had perhaps not known he was looking for: confirmation that neither of his parents had ever stopped wondering about him. That feeling is hard to describe, but the photographs below come close: