LOST YEARS
A WOMAN who was left on a train luggage rack at six weeks old has finally been reunited with her sister she knew she had.
Marguerite Huggett, now 74, has never known her own birthday, or anything else about where she came from.
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But with the help of Davina McCall on ITV’s Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace on Tuesday, she managed to find out more about her family.
She said: “I was shocked to discover on my birth certificate that both my mother and father were ‘unknown’.
“Who am I going to find that’s going to be able to tell me anything? I know very, very little.
“I feel now at my age this is my last chance to try and find out who my birth parents were.”
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“It’s knowing the reason that I was abandoned, that’s the drive to find my birth parents.
“What happened to me in that six weeks? Why weren’t my parents able to look after me?”
After she was found as a baby at London’s Paddington Station in 1946, Marguerite spent two years in an orphanage before being adopted by a couple in Rickmansworth, Herts.
However, they never told her the truth about her start in life and it wasn’t until her mid-40s she requested to see her adoption file.
I feel now at my age this is my last chance to try and find out who my birth parents were
Marguerite Huggett
The mum-of-two said: “This was the document the social worker showed me. Name and surname of mother – unknown.
“Name and surname of father – unknown. I was aware of the probability, no father’s name recorded. But what did come as a surprise was there were no names at all.”
In search of answers, she went to the Great Western Trust’s Didcot Railway Centre in Oxfordshire, where researchers found information in a 1940s Paddington station logbook.
And she was left shocked after discovering a newspaper cutting of herself as a newborn with the headline “Baby Left on Train Track”, which also revealed that she was abandoned at 3.35pm on platform 9 and found by a guard called CH Cook.
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In the show she was also able to place her DNA on an online database that traces birth relatives, and following a three-year investigation of the initial matches, the search team discovered the identity of her birth mother and father.
A match was found with a woman called Carol, who turned out to be Marguerite’s half-sister with the same father.
Speaking to host Nicky Campbell from her home in Australia, Carol says she believes her dad Arthur knew he had another child but not that she was abandoned.
She said: “I once overheard a snippet of a conversation between my parents.
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“I heard them say, ‘I wonder how old she would be?’ I assumed there might’ve been another child. I can only assume he didn’t know what happened to her.”
Her father Arthur was 19 and in the army when Marguerite was born. He died in 2010 and her mother Hannah died in 1992 at the age of 69.
“She already had a daughter and she wasn’t with that girl’s father. She was an unmarried woman and at the time having a second child would’ve been quite scandalous.”
“The daughter your mum had before you were born sadly died when she was nine.”
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Sliding a photograph across the table, Marguerite is stunned when she sees the family resemblance.
Holding her head in her hands, she says: “It’s this thing... you’ve never ever looked like anybody else. Amazing.”
She added: “I grew up all my life as an only child.
“To be told at 74 about my mother, my father who has four children. It’s quite a change. Amazing.”
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Three-part series Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace is on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday at 9pm.
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