Baby Abandoned in Theater Finds Answers 60 Years Later

Thanks to Facebook and DNA evidence
By Elizabeth Armstrong Moore,  Newser Staff
Posted May 16, 2017 7:06 AM CDT
Baby Abandoned in Theater Finds Answers 60 Years Later
A mother touches her young baby's toes.   (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Robert Weston first made headlines at just three weeks of age, when he was found abandoned in a movie theater bathroom in England in March 1956—left in expensive clothes, nestled in blankets, and with his head propped on a cushion. He's now in the news again, this time with a piece of the mystery of his abandonment solved that has him "euphoric." Thanks to his grown daughter's success in finding an expert on Facebook who used his DNA to map out a family tree and track down living relatives, he's been reunited with his siblings on his father's side in Scotland. "It was absolutely breathtaking," he tells the Times of London. "I had to touch them to make sure they were real."

Their father passed away in 1997, and Weston has yet to track down his mother, so the mystery isn't completely solved. A letter found among his father's papers says his mother "couldn't afford to look after her two children," so Weston is also left wondering if he has still another sibling. Weston's father apparently left his family in Scotland, and went to England. "We think that he met my mother there, had two children, and then went back to his former wife and had three more," says Weston. He says he doesn't blame his mother for leaving him, even though it resulted in seven years in a children's home that he says carry dark memories. "I've forgiven her," he tells the Sun. "She must have had a very good reason for what she did. Those first three weeks of my life were long enough to create that bond between mother and child." (This woman's reunion with her long-lost father went horribly.)

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