A heartfelt reunion: A woman who was abandoned as a newborn finally met a sister she never knew she had.
- Helen Knox, 32, was left sobbing in a cardboard box outside a hospital as she was just a few hours old.
- More than three decades later, Helen finally met her biological half-sister, Jess.
- The pair’s reunion was captured on ITV’s Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace.
Credits: ITV
Helen Knox, 32, had a heartbreaking upbringing. When she was just a baby, she was abandoned in a cardboard box outside a Chesterfield hospital on a cold December morning. At the time, Helen was only a few hours old, as Daily Mail reveals.
Thankfully, the abandoned newborn was soon adopted by a loving family. However, she never gave up on the dream to meet her biological relatives.
Helen’s story was uncovered in the ITV show Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace. The team used DNA testing data to discover her maternal half-sister, Jess. Surprisingly, she was also abandoned as a baby a little over a year before Knox was born.
Before seeing her sister for the first time ever, Helen said their reunion would be “life-changing.”
The mother-of-two commented:
“It’s a big thing, meeting my half-sister. It’s a very big, life-changing thing for us both. It’s not just something that’s going to happen today. This is going to be us for the rest of our lives. It’s exciting.”
What’s more, Jess was just as excited to meet her long-lost sister. She said:
“Being a foundling, you never think you’ll find anybody, so meeting her today will be something really special. It can be quite lonely being a foundling, and she probably has very similar thoughts if not the same, which for me is incredible because I haven’t ever had anyone really who fully understands what I’m feeling.”
Both sisters were incredibly emotional during their reunion.
Helen and Jess met at a Northamptonshire hotel, after taking COVID-19 tests, of course. At their moving meeting, they exchanged family photographs and shared touching stories from their childhoods. Knox said:
“To finally have found someone that you look like, it’s just amazing. And it’s my big sister, and we’re both foundlings together, which makes it even better.”
Jess added:
“I’m over the moon. I can’t wait to meet her kids, her fiancé, and it’s just going to change both of our lives for the better.”
Helen admits she has always struggled with not knowing her biological family.
The 32-year-old woman explained:
“I don’t know what the first few hours of my life were like, where I was and who I was with, who left me there… Knowing that somebody, maybe my birth parents, that somebody was here, and they left me here. Must have been a horrible reason for them to do it.”
The TV show was able to contact two of the medical workers who found the newborn sobbing in a cardboard box back in 1988. Gill and Susan were thrilled to meet Helen after more than three decades.
Furthermore, the program also identified Helen and Jess’s mother, but they said it was too early to reveal her name, as they were not aware whether she would want to contact her long-lost daughters.
