My missing mum

A man who launched an online search for his missing birth
mother discovered she died years ago in Germany - but
bureaucratic errors led to the family never being informed.

Gina Hauenstein, who came from a small village in
 northern Switzerland, had been listed as officially missing since 2000.

In January this year her son Marco, who spent his 
childhood with foster parents in another part of the 
country, posted a Facebook appeal for information about
 the mother he last saw as an infant.

His story captured attention across Europe, prompting
 new enquiries - until Swiss police confirmed that the 
remains of Gina Hauenstein had actually been found
 just across the border in Germany in 2013.

Marco did not have an easy start in life.

He knew very little about his birth family, but he did know
 that his mother had been a drug addict, and is believed 
to have spent time during the 1990s in Zurich's then-
notorious Platzspitz drugs scene, where addicts bought 
heroin in a city centre park and injected it openly.

When Marco was born in 1997, he was already addicted, 
and had to spend the first months of his life in hospital withdrawing and recovering.

Although his mother visited him from time to time, he never lived with her, and when Marco was just three, she disappeared.

Although Marco describes his childhood with foster parents as happy, he says questions about his birth family were "always on my mind".

His search first started when he was around 16, and he
 began by asking local town councils in the region of Switzerland his mother had come from. He also made enquiries with the police.

No information was forthcoming. Police told him that 
despite a search both within Switzerland and across 
Europe, no trace of her had ever been found.

Only when an appeal Marco made on Facebook began to attract attention - it was shared thousands of times in just
 a few days - did Swiss police look again at their records.

They discovered that in 2013 they had been contacted by German police, with news that human bones had been
 found in a village just across the border from Gina Hauenstein's home town in Switzerland.

The results of a forensic examination by Swiss investigators
confirmed the bones were Gina's.

Local police in her home town were informed in 2015,
 but inexplicably that information never reached either 
Gina's family or the German authorities investigating 
the remains.

This week, Swiss police visited Marco and broke the news,
apologising for a mistake they admit should never have
happened.

Marco, who patiently gave many interviews when he first launched his Facebook appeal just four weeks ago, is now taking time for himself to digest the news.

He has not posted on Facebook since January. While not 
quite the happy end he had hoped for, there was at least 
one positive development.

"Danke! Thank you! Merci!" he wrote. "Thanks to your help, 
on 20 January, I was able to meet my uncle and my grandmother for the first time. It was a very emotional moment.

"At last, I have part of my family back."