'Mirror baby' left in a box on doorstep: I've found my family after 62yrs

Staring down at the plain, grey doorstep, Harvey Shackell was filled with disbelief, but also a sense of wonder

- SARA WALLIS

More than 60 years earlier it was on this very same slab of concrete, on a freezing cold Christmas Day, that Harvey had been abandoned in a cardboard box as a newborn baby.

"I can't believe this is where I was left," he says. "If I hadn't been taken in, I would have frozen to death."

But he was taken in, by the kind-hearted owner behind that doorstep, Vera Wood, who discovered the tot hours later on Boxing Day, 1960.

So began more than six decades of questions that Harvey has only now, finally, found answers to. Not only has he been reunited with Vera, he has discovered two sisters and 16 half-siblings.

The moment he saw sister Cherry for the first time left him in tears.

"These last few months have been so emotional. I get choked up just talking about it," says 62-year-old Harvey, from Wiltshire, who is married to Vanessa and has two stepsons.

"When I met my sister Cherry, I couldn't believe how much alike we are.

"I feel a lot lighter now that I know where I'm from."

That mystery was reported by the Mirror at the time when we revealed a "beautiful blue-eyed" baby boy had been discovered in a cardboard box in Hayes, Middlesex.

He was named Christopher by nurses at nearby Hillingdon Hospital before being adopted by his emergency foster parents, who renamed him Harvey after taking him in at five days old.

Over the years, Harvey thought a lot about his birth family but only recently took action after his adoptive mum, now 95 and in a nursing home, showed him the old Daily Mirror clipping.

Harvey says: "I've had a good upbringing with a loving adoptive mum, dad and brother, but over the years you get this niggle in the back of your mind thinking 'Where did I come from?"

He launched an appeal in the Mirror last year saying he wanted to know his roots at last, and also turned to hit ITV show Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace.