Families will be reunited as relatives find loved ones they have spent years separated from, in a new ITV1 series.

Long Lost Family, produced by Wall To Wall, part of the Shed Media Group, will be presented by Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell.

The series will help relatives, some of whom have been searching in vain for many years, find the family members they are desperate to trace. Long Lost Family will explore the background and context of each family’s estrangement and track the detective work and often complex and emotional process of finding each lost relative before they are reunited.

Many of the people featured in the series have been adopted or gave children up for adoption when they were young Wall To Wall will be working closely with Adults Affected by Adoption – NORCAP, the UK’s foremost charitable organisation working in this field. Adoption is personal territory for Nicky Campbell, who was adopted as a child and is a patron of the British Association for Adoption and Fostering.

Nicky: ‘I’ve never been so excited about a show in my career. I have a deep emotional connection with it, being an adopted person and having traced my own birth families. I can’t wait to work with Davina and help to give people the opportunity to reconnect with relatives missing from their lives.’

Davina said: “”I believe that families are the most important part of everyone’s life and so when I first heard about the ethos of this series, I knew I wanted to be involved. The series promises to be heart-warming, emotional and life affirming….just the kind of show I love watching. Nicky Campbell is lovely and has such insight, I can’t wait to be working with him and I am dead chuffed to be part of it.”

The 6×60 series was commissioned for ITV1 by Jo Clinton-Davis, Controller of Popular Factual and Alison Sharman, Director of Factual and Daytime. Long Lost Family is executive produced by Wall To Wall’s Head of Factual, Leanne Klein. The Series Producer and Director is Duncan Coates and the show is set to air later in the year.

Leanne Klein said: “We’re delighted to be making such a fantastically uplifting show for ITV. Long Lost Family reveals so much about British families and how we’ve changed in the last few decades. It’s wonderful to be able to help people desperate to reunite with long lost family members, many of who have been searching unsuccessfully for years. We’ve already had thousands of applicants.”