A WAR baby in Dawlish has been united with an American family she never knew she had.

Linda Campbell, aged 76, met her half-brother Larry Lawson, 59, for the first time when he flew in with his son from Florida.

Their father was an American pilot in the Second World War. He met Linda’s mother while he was stationed in England with the RAF.

Linda said: ‘Seeing Larry was like meeting someone I’d just met the day before. We gelled instantly. It was absolutely wonderful. I don’t know whether it’s sunk in yet.’

Linda has spent more than seven decades as an only child. The siblings found each other through an ancestry website after they’d uploaded their DNA results.

Larry said: ‘It was so emotional meeting Linda and her family. It’s been the most amazing event that’s happened in my life and I was a policeman for 39 years.

‘I don’t even know if there are words to describe it. The connection has been amazing – it’s like we’ve always known one another.

‘She’s got five other brothers and sisters to meet now. Linda’s got quite a large Yankee family.’

Linda added: ‘I’m now looking forward to getting to know my other brothers and sisters and a whole load of nieces and nephews. All those years I thought I was the only one.’

Linda’s mum met Linda and Larry’s dad in London during the Second World War. He was aged 30 at the time, married and divorced with two girls. Her mum was 21 and, despite pressure from the church to go for adoption, kept her daughter and became a single parent. She later married Linda’s step dad and the three moved to the West Country in the 1950s.

Linda said: ‘My mum was a real character. We lived with my nan and grandad at first and they helped out while mum went out to work.

‘Mum tried to tell me about my dad lots of times but I had a step dad from aged six and looked on him as a father. I didn’t want to know the story as I felt that it was betraying him.

‘Dad knew I was around. He came back to England a couple of times to try to reconnect with mum. He spoke to me on the street in London and told me who he was but my nan told him to go away. I really wasn’t interested.

‘But then as I got older I was more curious but didn’t know where to begin. My late husband Roddy was looking for him on my behalf years ago, before the DNA kits came out. I wish he was here to see it all come to fruition.’

Linda took a DNA test and her daughter Paige, a retired police officer, put the results online.

Paige said: ‘It’s been an astonishing story how it’s unfolded. We went online to find mum’s paternal heritage and uncovered an entire family.

‘I was working with information that had been misheard and diluted through the years so there were a few false starts.

‘However, 18 months ago, I woke to an email from a man in America who had run a search on his own DNA. He could see we were very closely related but didn’t understand why. Tentatively we shared information until I sent an email to say I thought he was my mum’s half-brother.’

Larry added: ‘Paige and I put two and two together and within 15 minutes found we were related.

‘The connection is surreal. I’m a career cop, my niece is a career cop. Rules and styles are a little different, but police officers are the same all over the world.

‘Dad never spoke of a family in England – things were different then, the way men looked at things. But he talked about how much he loved England and how much he loved the people here. And now I know what he meant.

‘He didn’t talk a lot about the war but he talked about England itself constantly. He talked about the air raid sirens and how everyone formed an orderly line to enter the shelters. He was continuingly commenting on that.

‘I’d been toying with the idea of family hereditary and was intrigued to see what came up but I never dreamed I’d find a sister and a whole new family in England.’