Searching for My Other Mam - Our Lives

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Searching for My Other Mam

Simulcast of network BBC One in high definition. From 03/11/2010

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Our Lives: Series 6: Searching for My Other Mam

Series 6

BBC One - Our Lives, Series 6, Searching for My Other Mam

Gerallt Wyn Jones goes looking for the black family he’s never known.


Years after being adopted by white Welsh parents, Gerallt Wyn Jones goes looking for the black father he’s never known, and for the young white mother who felt that she had to give him away.

Having been raised Welsh by his adoptive white parents, Gerallt Wyn Jones finds the courage at last to go looking for his birth parents. In 1973, born black to a white unwed mother, Gerallt was given away when he was only a few weeks old. 
 
Raised speaking Welsh in a very white north west Wales, he has always felt different from everyone else. Nearly 50 years on - and fearing he may have left it too late - he can’t hold back any longer from searching for the black father and heritage he’s never known, and for the young white mother who felt she had no choice but to give him away.
 
Gerallt lives in Bethesda, a slate mining village on the edge of the magnificent Snowdonia National Park, and was the only black kid in his schools. When he turned 16, he was shown his adoption documents by Olwen, his adoptive mam. They said that his father was black and had come from Barbados to work in Britain. He learns that his mother was young, unmarried and white at a time when prejudice and bigotry was rife. Indeed, one adoption agency refused to accept him once they understood that he was black. 
 
This is also the story of Olwen Jones, the woman who adopted Gerallt. Now in her mid-eighties, Olwen explains that she was keen to adopt a baby who wasn’t being accepted by families because of race and colour. She is fully supportive of her beloved adopted son as he starts his search - she only hopes he hasn’t left it too late.

Our Lives: Series 6

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