"Whatever drove her to do it, she must have been under great pressure," says Dave Shreeve. "As a parent myself I now realise what an awful lot it would take to abandon your own child. My mother must have been desperate and have hoped she was doing what was best for me."Most foundlings will try to investigate their past at some stage, and the decision to do so is often sparked by a major event in their lives. For Sheila it was turning 30 and feeling she had come to an important crossroads. Some believe they might have belonged to a teenager who couldn't cope, or an unmarried woman with no financial support.

But there is always the possibility that their mother had been raped, or that she was a prostitute.But while most feel isolated and rejected, few are bitter. "There is a possibility I may be Asian or Pakistani, but I'll never be certain. Whether or not I come from a particular cultural or religious background might affect the sort of person I am."Many foundlings find it hard to live with the question of why their mother had to give them up. "Because of my colouring, people often ask me about myself - where I get my dark hair or dark eyes - but I have to say I've no idea," she says. Now 30, Sheila was left in a shop doorway in Birmingham when she was about three weeks old and was then adopted She believes she is of mixed race. At the moment he looks a lot like me, but who do I look like?"Sheila Smaza has experienced similar uncertainty about her looks. All he has since discovered is that he was left at the Elephant and Castle tube station in November 1965, when he was about 10 days old."There's a big gap for me, where everyone else has a history," he says.

"When my girlfriend, Jayne, became pregnant, the doctors asked us routine questions, like whether there were any hereditary problems they should know about I hadn't a clue When Ryan was born it brought a lot more home to me. He is my only blood relative, and when he grows up I won't be able to tell him anything about his roots. Some have been able to find out a little about their early lives - such as the name of the person who found them or the hospital to which they were taken. But most know so little about themselves that it creates practical as well as emotional problems.Dave Shreeve, who is now 30 and lives in Warrington, grew up knowing he was adopted, but learnt he was a foundling only in October 1992, when he decided to look for his natural parents.

That wasn't done when I was found, but it's important because it's the only link that child will have with the past."Since she started the group three years ago, Sandy has been contacted by more than 40 foundlings, ranging in age from their twenties to their seventies. But she has never been able to discover who her mother was, where she came from, or why she could no longer cope with looking after her child. All Sandy knows is that she was about 18 days old when she was abandoned, was wearing good clothes and had been well cared for. There the trail goes cold.Recognising that other people must be as frustrated by this lack of information as she was, Sandy, who now has a family of her own and lives in Milton Keynes, has set up a support group for those facing similar problems."It's an immensely traumatic thing to live with, because no adults have been reunited with the natural parents who abandoned them," she says. "You feel you are up against a brick wall because no one can say where you came from, why you were left or even how long you'd been alive. Nowadays they keep newspaper cuttings for abandoned babies, as well as the clothes they were wearing. A child with no name, no birthday, no history. Found at the back of a newspaper office near King's Cross in London and later adopted, she has tried for years to find out more about her past.

There will be feelings of betrayal, abandonment, sadness and anger. Throughout its life that child will be plagued by the thought, "Was I really so awful that my own mother couldn't bear to keep me?" Sandy has lived with these feelings all her life Thirty-nine years ago she, too, was an abandoned baby. Every time Sandy Webster hears of another baby abandoned by its mother, her heart aches for what that child will go through. She knows how shocked it will be to learn it was given up; how it will resent having only a presumed date of birth; will hate the tag "foundling", and believe it is somehow different from the rest of society. Now, at the corner of Boardwalk and Park Avenue (the Mayfair and Park Lane of the American game) you can see a plaque to Charles Darrow..