Dave Ashford, 54, was put up for adoption as a baby. It took until a year ago for him to discover that he has three sisters, Nicki, Becky, and Katherine. The women tracked Dave down on Long Lost Family.

“Within a split second of meeting each other, once we got over the initial shock, it was like we had always known each other,” Dave says. “All these little things were coming out.”

Dave was even more surprised when he found out his mother was given a horrible ultimatum back in 1966. She could either give up her newborn son or lose both him and Nicki, who was just 18 months old at the time, to social services.

“Mum was 16 when she got pregnant,” said Nicki Goscomb, the oldest child.“She was a child, she made a mistake. She fell in love with our dad who was married and wasn’t able to be with him. She was told she brought shame on the family. She fought hard to keep me and her hand was forced – she had no choice to give him up for adoption.”

“My grandmother said, ‘You have two children and no husband, you’re not fit to be a mother. Give him up or I will phone social services and they’ll get taken into care,'” Nicki explained.

“Nobody should ever have to choose. My brother was six weeks old and he was sacrificed so I could stay. It does make me feel guilty and sad. I was kept with Mum and he was given away,” she added.

A few years later, their mother had two more daughters, Becky and Katherine. She was able to keep them because she had moved out of her parents’ house.

Nicki was 15 when she discovered Dave’s birth certificate hidden in a box. She confronted her mother about it.

“I’m rifling through and find a ‘Nicholas James’, born 18 months after me,” she said. “I thought, ‘Who can this be? I must have a brother’ But Mum shut down, she couldn’t deal with it. It’s a part of her she had locked away because it was too painful.”

The mother died in a tragic car accident 15 years ago. She was never able to meet her son.

However, Nicki and Becky fulfilled their mum’s dying wish and were reunited with their brother in December 2019.

Dave was adopted by loving parents who told him early on that they were not his biological parents. When he found out his biological mother did actually want him, he was overwhelmed. It was bittersweet when he found out she died in 2006.