ENGLISH writer Colin Butts has launched an appeal to find his biological Irish mother after being diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer.
Mr Butts, 57, was born in London in 1959 to a woman named Catherine Mary Quinlan, who named him Louis Michael Quinlan.
"I've known since I was born that I was adopted as my parents told me straight away," he told The Irish Post.
Mr Butts was adopted from Cheniston Nursing Home in Kensington, London. (Picture: Craig Sugden/Facebook)"My adoptive parents were quite a bit older, my mum died when I was 19 and my dad when I was 25 so I've kind of been on my own since then," Mr Butts said.
A few years ago, Mr Butts had a chance encounter with a woman who he thought could be his mother.
"This lady really seemed to be the right candidate for being my natural mother because she got married in the same area I was born a couple of years after my adoption in Kensington.
"The person she married was named Michael, which is the same as my middle name, and she was 17 when she got married so she was 15 when she was giving birth to me."
Using National Organisation for Children of Adopted Parents (NORCAP), Mr Butts managed to make contact with the woman in question.
"They told me there was good news and bad news," he said, "good news was I had four half siblings, and the bad news the lady died some months before."
Unfortunately a DNA test revealed the siblings and Colin Butts were not related.
"Up until that point, I felt emotionally completely detached from it, almost like a paper chase, but at that moment it became very human and very real.
"From that point on, I employed a private investigator to do some digging here in Britain and he was of the opinion that it was almost certainly someone from Ireland and had probably gone back over there.
"In February this year I was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer so I've been thinking is this something I should do? Is it fair to come into the life of somebody only to possibly disappear not long afterwards?
"I thought about it and, because I haven't got the time or resources to go through an Irish investigator, I thought I need to go through the media."
While Mr Butts' mother was named Catherine Mary Quinlan, he also has documents naming her as 'Mrs K Quinlan'.
He was born September 11, 1959 in Cheniston Nursing Home in Kensington.
"I'm lead to believe that this was a well to do private nursing home, which makes me think that this story wasn't as dark as some of the others," he says.
