image copyrightHelen Ward
"They found me in a bag, dressed in blue."
Raised in a warm and loving family in Belfast, Northern Ireland, David McBride always knew he was adopted.
But it wasn't until he turned 15 and applied for a birth certificate to join the military that he realized how little was known about his origins.
The document was almost blank. His biological parents were listed as unknown, as were details about his birthplace and even his date of birth.
His adoptive father told him how little he knew. McBride had been abandoned and, as a baby, was found in the front seat of an unlocked car.
Together, McBride and his father decided to find out everything they could. They began researching the local public library, poring over newspaper clippings.
At the time he was found, his case hit the headlines because child neglect was virtually unheard of in Northern Ireland at the time.
McBride explains that the Church often provided support, or at least shelter, to mothers and their babies who may have been born out of wedlock.
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"If a woman became pregnant outside of marriage, she was rejected. And the problem was the tendency to hide everything."
The newspaper clippings didn't give him much information, but they did confirm that he had received good care. "They fed me well and took good care of me."
He assumed his mother had been young and scared. He decided to try to find her.
The "tartan twins"
However, decades passed and, despite her searches and even her participation in a BBC program about abandoned children, McBride found few answers.
So, encouraged by his sister, he decided to take a DNA test.
The result changed everything. He had a biological sister.
"It was a wonderful surprise... It was like Christmas had arrived."
Her name was Helen Ward; But instead of answering her questions about her mother, she had many herself: she had also been abandoned as a baby.
"They found me in a green bag inside a phone booth," says Ward. "The first thing I thought was that we were the twins in the bag."
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They weren't twins. They had been born seven years apart and were found on opposite sides of the Irish border. However, the similarities were striking.
"A truck driver found me," Ward says. "In the bag was a warm bottle and a change of clothes. She was very well dressed and warm."
Like McBride, Ward had grown up in a loving adoptive family, but when she became a mother she decided she needed to know more about her mother.
She contacted a social worker in the area where she was found and was shown a birth certificate similar to the one McBride had seen years before. It included "unknown mother", "unknown father" and "girl found unprotected in a telephone booth."
"I was very upset. You have so many questions, and it's so hard to find answers."
Ward also conducted her own search in the years that followed: she told her personal story on a call-in radio show, and found both the police officer who had handled her case in 1969 and the truck driver who had first found her.
But it was after a friend gave her a homemade DNA kit that she found her missing brother. "It was incredible," he says. "I kept pinching myself to make sure it wasn't a dream."
A new search
When they finally met face to face and recognized physical traits in each other, the experience was almost overwhelming.
"You're trying to take it all in. You have so much to say you want to explode," Ward says.
"As soon as we met, everything around us seemed to cease to exist," McBride says.
But when one search ended, another resumed: that of his parents.
They finally discovered that their mother had died at age 90, shortly before they met. His father had died years before.
But they managed to reconstruct some parts of their history.
"Our mother was from the country. Our father was from the city," McBride says. "She was much younger. The glitz of the city brought her from the west coast of Ireland to Dublin. Our father was a conductor in Dublin. She probably met him when she went to the dance halls. They had a romance that lasted 40 years or more."
McBride believes that for the affair to last so long, they must have been in love. But it was a complicated relationship.
He was married. Furthermore, he was Protestant, while she was Catholic.
At a time when Ireland was firmly divided by religious differences and remained socially conservative, David believes they were simply breaking too many taboos.
"Catholics and Protestants. Born out of wedlock... What hope did they have?" he asks.
a third brother
However, one more surprise awaited her: Ward remembered a story she had read during her years of research, and it made her think: could she have another brother?
"The story was that in 1965 they found a baby in a telephone booth," he says. "She was in a bag, with a warm bottle. So all the details of her story were part of mine and also part of David's."
A young Australian woman who watched a television program McBride and Ward made together about their search began to think about her own Irish father, John. It turned out that he was indeed her biological brother.
"He was the middle child," Ward explains. "When the three of us sat down to get to know each other, it was surreal. You're seeing your family. And you have a thousand questions. But in that moment it was magical."
These unanswered questions leave a void that they recognize may never be filled.
But both Helen and David say they can't judge their mother for her decisions.
"It must have been horrible for her," says Helen, "to abandon her three babies so soon after she had carried them and given birth to them."
David remembers seeing a video of his elderly mother clinging to a doll and refusing to let go.
"I wonder if, towards the end of her life, her mind was saying, 'This is my daughter. I've lost three children and you're not going to take her away from me.'"
*This article is based on an episode of BBC World Service Outlook.
This article was originally written in English and we used an artificial intelligence tool to translate it. A BBC journalist reviewed the text before publication. Learn more about how we use AI.
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