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Vicky Anning talks to an adopted woman who found her birth mother after 30 years.

Until she was 30 years old, Karen Scott knew almost nothing about her biological mother.

She was still a baby when her birth mother handed her over to an adoptive family in the Nottingham office of the Catholic Children's Society.

And although Karen's new family made no secret of her adoption, they had little information about where their daughter came from. "If I'd have had pictures and information, some of the intrigue would have been answered," says Karen, now a

Jigsaw complete - Karen Scott

38-year-old mother-of-three and part-time student at the University of Nottingham.

As she grew up in her comfortable East Midlands home, Karen harboured a resentful image of her birth mother spurned by an uncaring father.

In fact, as often happens in adoption, the reality bore little resemblance to her fantasy.

Karen discovered she was actually the product of a brief holiday romance. Her birth mother was a Dutch nanny who worked for a family near Nottingham in the early 1960s who had never even told her Spanish lover that she was pregnant.

It wasn't until Karen was pregnant with twins herself in her late 20s that she decided to find out more about her family background.

"It's when you get married or have children that you start thinking about it," she says.

"When I was having twins, people kept on asking me if there were twins in my family, and I didn't know."

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