I just became aware at the age of 19 that this woman existed, normally I’d be really happy to find out I had a sister, but there was something about this story that I knew I couldn’t go looking into.

There’s this status from this lady and she started saying these things like her maiden name being Harris, like mine, where she lived, that her dad was a bus driver.On a family holiday, her father had mentioned he had been married before and had a daughter who was ten years older than her. I knew he was there for my birth so I knew he would have held me and I think that connection always remained." The 77-year-old mum-of-two who now lives in Berkshire, says she always wanted to know more about her dad but was unable to because of her ‘controlling’ mum who sadly passed away in 2014. I started working at 15, and I would take the number one from Langworthy Road to Pendleton Church and then the bus to Manchester.

A woman who grew up thinking she was an only child has discovered she has a half-sister - who had lived just 15 miles away from her. The pair had grown up a couple of streets away from each other in Salford, but neither knew the other existed. Joan eventually got married and moved out of Salford to set up her life down south with a husband and two children in her mid twenties. I had to read it several times, and the best thing about it for me was that she said she was so sad that she didn’t know my dad.She said: “I always felt like there was something inside me, I felt as though there was a thread connecting me and my dad.” Joan said: “I have a friend who also lived in Salford and told me about the group, I found it and I thought I should post something in there but I didn’t. The 67-year-old was dumbfounded, and says she had believed she was an only child after her older brother David, died when she was 17.

So much so that Jean gifted Joan their father’s driving gloves which she wears to feel close to him. So one day, she decided to post on a Facebook group called “We grew up in Salford” asking if anybody knew of her father. Over the years I’d think about her, and they weren’t always friendly thoughts because I’d ask myself why she hasn’t tried to find us.”

But, the post from Joan Constantine, spoke of her father, Jim Harris, who Joan only knew had driven tanks during WW2 and had gone on to become a bus driver in Salford.