About Me

Despite my surname I am of proud Italian heritage. 

I was born in October 1958; my mother was a young nanny in Manchester who was in a long-term relationship with a young Italian immigrant. 

My father was planning to return home to Sicily and had tried unsuccessfully to convince my mother to go with him, only for her to discover that she was pregnant after he had returned to his own country.

As it wasn’t the done thing back then to have a baby with a foreign father, my mother was strongly advised by family members to ‘get rid of it.’ Advice that thankfully for me she ignored. 

Instead she was shuttled away to a ‘mother and baby’ home where she gave birth without outside interference.

When I was five years old my mother married an ex-squaddie who in all honesty made my life a misery as he would never accept me as his own, although happy for me to take on his surname – a lifelong regret of mine.

Fast forward several years and having met and married the love of my life Liz, we started a family of our own. I had tried several times over the years to find out more about my ‘natural’ father but other than being told his name, information was very short in supply, either via my mother or via the only official channels available to me at the time.

My daughters Amy and Ellie and my son Joe were always told of their Italian heritage, they have always taken pride in the fact that they carry an Italian bloodline as have my grandchildren Keira, Charlie, Cole, Finn, Ruben and Albie.

In desperation to find out more about my father I applied to appear on the TV show ‘Long lost family.’ 

During a conversation with my mother about our plans to look into my father’s background she let me know that my father had actually returned to Manchester with his new wife the year after he had initially left to go home. She had decided not to tell him about my birth as he had obviously ‘moved on’.

With this new information in hand I held a couple of telephone interviews with the production team before receiving a letter in the post explaining that the researchers had come to a ‘dead end.’

Liz however was undeterred and set about her own investigation. Firstly she looked into births in and around Manchester the year after my own birth and lo and behold, there was a girl born in the area of Manchester that my father lived in. the baby girl had been born to an Italian couple, one of whom could have been my father.

After buying her birth certificate, yes I know that it’s a bit weird, Liz then started to trawl Facebook in search of people with the same surname. 

She earned a real break here as, unbeknown to us, Italian girls keep their own surname when they marry. 

Liz eventually found a lady of the right age group with the same name and contacted her on Facebook messenger. 

At this time I only had two photos of my dad. One was of him and my mother on a park bench in Manchester, the other was of the two of them at a wedding in England with what I believed to be his sister and her husband.

Liz had sent a cropped photo of my father to the Italian lady with a simple request asking if she knew the man in the photo and waited for a response.

A few days later she received a message in Italian which we quickly deciphered thanks to Google Translate (other options are available) the message was simple “Why do want to know who the man is, this man is very dear to me.”

Over the next hour or so we exchanged messages during which I explained that I believed the man to be my natural father. When asked if I had any other photos of the man in question I sent both of the full photos.

What seemed an age afterwards we received a message back asking us to wait for a few days whilst she discussed the photos with her brothers and sister. 

The following Monday evening I received a message back explaining that my sister (for that is who she is) had the exact same photo from the wedding that I had sent to her, the only difference being that my mother wasn’t on her version.

The message also explained that I have another sister and two brothers, all of whom have children of their own, plus there were also a couple of grandchildren in the mix.

Over the next few weeks we formed a WhatsApp group and quickly made arrangements to visit Sicily in the October when I would celebrate my 58th birthday with my Italian siblings and their families.

During one of our early conversations I had been told that my dad had sadly passed away in June 2004, which actually didn’t hit me until I visited the village church that had held his funeral service. I later visited his beautiful grave where I would shed more tears.

Over the next three years I visited my family and friends several times, several members of my own family have also visited whilst my sister returned to Manchester for the first time since she had left as a four year old. I arranged for her to visit the chapel where she had been baptised and the priest gave her a copy of her certificate from the day.

We have continued to grow our bond, albeit the Covid-19 pandemic put us all on hold with regard to visiting for a couple of years, although we continued to speak to each other most days via WhatsApp.

Sicily, and Agrigento, the region our family is from, is an incredibly beautiful place and I have been fortunate to have discovered its beauty during several visits since that first time.

I love the photo alongside this text, it was taken in San Leone (Agrigento) during another birthday meal for me, this time in October 2023, when Liz and I were accompanied by our eldest grandson Cole. A good friend of mine Daz Sampson, who represented the UK in The Eurovision Song Contest in 2006, told me that he loves how many people in the photo look just like me.