A north-east family is preparing a rousing reception to welcome a brother they never knew they had into the fold.
Rob Weston was abandoned in a Birmingham cinema 61 years ago and
grew up not knowing anything about his relatives.
Later this month Mr Weston, who lives in Plymouth, will get to put faces to names for the first time during a three-day stay in Turriff.
The lecturer has already met his half-brothers Tommy Chalmers, who lives in Burghead, and Frankie Chalmers, from Turiff, as well as half-sister Pat McBain from Banff.
And now an invitation has been extended to the whole family to make connections and trade stories with him and his wife Marie, who will meet the relatives for the first time.
Yesterday Tommy Chalmers revealed anticipation was building ahead of the meeting in an online group conversation, entitled “Clan Chalmers”.
And the Moray man is looking forward to rekindling bonds with his newly-discovered relative after he made a brief “fact finding” visit earlier this year.
He said: “We are all looking forward to it. It will be nice for the whole family to get to meet him.
“Rob’s been speaking to a lot of people on a group chat we’ve got set up but he’s got no idea who they actually are really or anything like that.
“It will be good for him to be able to put faces to names on a piece of paper for the first time.”
Mr Weston was left in an Odeon toilet in 1956 after his mother decided she could no longer afford to care for him.
The lecturer was adopted as a baby and began searching for his blood-family in the 1970s without success.
A match in a national DNA database then set in motion a chain of events which led him to the relatives he never knew he had in the north-east of Scotland.
Mr Chalmers’s father, Charlie, moved to England in the 1950s, where he had at least one child with Mr Weston’s mother, before he moved back to Aberdeenshire.
Recent attempts to track down the identity of the lecturer’s mum have provided renewed hope the final piece of the family tree may be about to slot into place.
Mr Chalmers added: “At one point we thought there might have been another sister too but that turned out not to be the case. We’re certain there was another brother though.”
