Carol Venus and her husband George first came to the attention Home Truths as the couple who had fallen through the links in the housing chain and spent many months living in their car, finding a house a few months before George died. Carol contacted us again recently to reveal another part of her life story...

Carol has recently been re-united with her own father. As a child she’d always been unable to accept her mother and grandmother’s story that her stepfather was her real dad. "I kept on saying ‘I know he’s not my father. Who is my dad? You know who he is.' " Eventually, when Carol was about 11 years old, her grandmother admitted that her stepfather wasn’t her real father. In a strange twist, Carol had often spoken to the man who was her grandfather, and the man who turned out to be her father. The woman who would have been her paternal grandmother wouldn’t have anything to do with her.

As she grew older, Carol constantly tried to trace her dad, "No-one could help me. There was nothing, nothing at all." George, Carol’s husband, who died recently, supported Carol in her search, concerned at times for the risk of rejection which may be in store for his wife.

Carol knew nothing about her father’s circumstances, but eventually persuaded her mother to tell her his name. The breakthrough came when Julian, Carol’s son, introduced his mother to the internet, where they posted a message just before Christmas. On the 2nd January this year, they received a reply from Canada from a woman who turned out to be the friend of Carol's father’s wife’s sister. After the initial excitement, doubts set in, "I began to think will he want to see me? Is this going to be one big flop," said Carol. For quite a while nothing happened, then, "Out of the blue, I had a phone call from my father’s second eldest daughter, who’d be a half-sister to me. She said she would talk to her parents at the right moment and see how they felt."

Nearly two weeks later, on 25th January Carol had a phone call, "This voice said, ‘Hallo Carol, this is your dad.’ I couldn’t say anything at all, but thought, ‘at least he wants to see me.’ " In finding her father, Carol’s also delighted to have found four half-sisters and one half brother, and numerous nephews and nieces.

On 5th February, Carol and Julian met up with her father, Dennis, and his wife, Joan. The meeting was a great success, "Dennis said he waited for me to contact him for years," said Carol, "He hugged me so hard. I don’t think I’ve ever been hugged so hard in my life. I’d waited so long for that. George would have been delighted."