61-year-old Robert Weston spent his entire life desperately searching for answers as to why his mum abandoned him in a cinema toilet at three weeks old.

Finally, he didn’t only find the answer to his question but he found his real family and also his original name.

For six decades he’s been named Robert after the policeman who scooped him up from the toilet floor in the Odeon, Birmingham, on March 24, 1956.


His surname, Weston, came from his adoptive parents, George and Irene Weston, who rescued him when he was seven from a traumatic childhood in a care home.

Young Robert is now a father of six children during two ­mar­­riages. But he still lacks a peaceful mind because he really wanted to know what hap­­pened – and why – in the first weeks of his life.

His answers came when his daughter Emma, 35, suggested he put an appeal on Facebook.

After that, Genetic genealogist Julia Bell got in touch and began work using a DNA database, first finding Robert’s half-brother Tommy Chalmers.

But Tommy, who lives in Moray, Scotland, was not an only child. Robert found he also has five other half-siblings on his dad’s side – Douglas, Jimmy, Frankie, Charles and sister Pat.

When he met them in June they told him they’d always suspected their father, Charlie Chalmers, who died aged 74 in 1997, had another family.

Then more detective work led Julia to Bryn Jones, a half-brother on Robert’s mother’s side – and the whole story came out.

Robert learned he was the result of a love affair and has forgiven his mother Betty for the choices she was forced to make after Charlie walked out on her.

Betty died from meningitis at 31 when Robert was five.


The Full Story

His Father, Charlie left his wife and three sons in Scotland in 1950 in search of work in Rugby, Warks.

It was here he started an affair with factory worker Betty, who will later on become Robert’s Mum, then, she was living in a tiny home with her mum, dad, and uncle.

First, they had a son called Larry. Four years later, before Betty gave birth to Robert, Charlie returned to his family in Scotland. Desperate Betty must have felt she couldn’t bring up two young boys and left baby Robert in the cinema.

She then moved to North Wales, where she settled down with a local man and had two more children, Bryn and Wendy, but she died not long after that.

Together with Larry and Bryn, Robert visited Betty’s grave in Llanfaglan, overlooking the Menai Strait.

Bryn who was a railway engineer said: “It was very emotional for all three of us.”

Larry also showed Robert snapshots of the life he would have had if his mum had not abandoned him. As they flicked through a family album, Robert had to blink away the tears.

He says: “I saw a picture where I would have been almost five. My mum was standing outside a caravan and I pictured myself in that scene and what it would have been like. I would have loved to have been there.”


After so many years searching, Robert had 101 questions for Larry about his mum. But one resonated most strongly because it married up with the mum he’s carried in his head for all those years.

“It was Larry telling me what she sounded like, how she was softly spoken, and that’s how I had pictured her,” he says. When he began comparing life stories, Robert realized their childhoods were worlds apart.

Source: http://borednigerian.com/61-years-later-man-finally-finds-mum-abandoned-cinema-toilet/