A WOMAN who has spent most of her life looking for her long-lost dad has finally tracked him down - and discovered that he grew up just around the corner from her home.

Mum-of-three Donna Robertson has been looking for her father since she was 13 years old.

She had all but given up hope of finding him until an internet search on her 47th birthday came up trumps. Donna was ecstatic to find the family tree of her father Keith Thompson, who now lives in New Zealand and did not even know she existed.

And the St Barnabas Primary School cook, from Leeman Road, York, discovered the 72-year-old grew up just round the corner from her house and went to Poppleton Road Primary School.

She said: "I'm practically on the same road that he grew up on. I always felt at home here and when I found out I realised that everything is coincidental."

Donna, who grew up in foster care and children's homes, added: “All my mum ever told me was that he’d been in the Merchant Navy and now lived in New Zealand.

“She’d had a very brief affair with him while he was on a visit home, but they hadn’t kept in touch."

Donna spoke to all the friends and relatives of her mum, who has since died, in a desperate bid to find out more information about her dad but drew a blank every time.

She finally managed to track him down through ancestry websites and contacted him through relatives. The pair took a DNA test and after an anxious wait, Donna received the good news she had been hoping for.

She said: "I was going to be devastated if he wasn't my dad, I had been looking for him for so long. I was ecstatic when I got the result. It's very exciting.

"My children are really happy for me, they have got a grandad now.

"He said it's a whole new chapter in our lives. But he's in the furthest possible place away in the world."

Donna has now set up a GoFundMe page in a bid to raise enough money to travel to meet her father in Napier, New Zealand, for the first time.

The pair have spoken over Facetime and Donna has now decided, with Keith's blessing, to take his surname as well. She said: "I have to do it, I have to go out there. I feel like I have found a piece of me.

"We have lots in common. We will never stop talking, we have years to catch up on."

Visit gofundme.com/8gqdg-help-me-meet-my-father.