INSPIRED by the programme Who Do You Think You Are, two brothers from Corsham have taken two flights and a ten hour overnight train on a journey of self-discovery to Ukraine after being contacted on a genealogy website.

Stefan Barbaruk, 69, of Park Lane, together with his 63-year-old brother Peter, travelled to the country at the end of August after a Ukrainian relative sent a picture of their mother on ancestry.com.

Mr Barbaruk, who is the Business Development Manager at Wessex Chambers of Commerce, said: "We knew nothing at all about our family on my mother's side until about a year ago when someone sent us a cropped picture of my mother's face.

"I sent an email back straight away asking for the whole picture because I had the same image but with six other people in it. Low and behold, she did and we realised it was the same. The eureka moment to me was that photograph."

The brothers, who knew their parents had Polish-Ukrainian origins, said their main focus was learning the language upon arrival in Britain in 1948, where they lived in a displaced persons camp in Westwells for nearly ten years.

"We weren't interested in family," Mr Barbaruk explained. "We just knew, my brother and I, that it was the two of us and we always assumed that the Russians had destroyed any information about the family."

The photograph, which was sent by a Ukrainian woman called Kate Farmana who is their cousin and now lives in Los Angeles, sparked a curiosity in the brothers which resulted in the trip to the country which is still experiencing civil unrest.

He said: "One moment we didn't have any family and the next we did. We went over there for six days and it was quite tiring as we had two flights and an overnight journey by train but we met the whole family and it was a momentous time.

"When the war started and Germany invaded the Ukraine, my mother was taken to work in a German factory. We found out from our trip that when the German's came across to invade, it was going to be my mother's father who was going to go to the factory but she had just been through a failed relationship and was feeling a bit low so she decided to go instead."

They were taken to Emilia's place of her birth, the church she used to attend and were told that the Russian's letter censoring was the reason why the family were unable to stay in contact.

The brothers, who also visited Germany in 2007 to meet long-lost family, are encouraging others to reach out while they still can. The Business Development Manager said: "If you have old photographs lying about, ask your parents who they are and write it on the back of the photograph because once they are gone, you won't know."