Ariel Bruce

Ariel Bruce

Ariel Bruce (born 1951) is a specialist search consultant for film, TV and documentary makers. Born in Hampstead, London, she is the granddaughter of Marxist economist Fritz Sternburg. Bruce has over 20 years experience as a qualified social worker and search specialist.

From 2011 until the present day, she has been working as a search and social work consultant on the ITV1 series Long Lost Family^[1]. As the series' head consultant, Bruce has undertaken the research into tracing missing family members for all 43 episodes of the series. The Telegraph Newspaper has called Bruce "the Agatha Christie of the adoption world'.^[2]

Alongside 'Long Lost Family, Bruce has worked on a number of other British TV series, including Who Do You Think You Are and The Gift. In the early 1990s she worked on the Channel 4 TV series Cutting Edge, providing research for the episode entitled Relative Strangers. In 2009 Bruce returned to Cutting Edge to work on an episode called The Homecoming which told the story of a former child care home residents attempts to trace their birth family.^[3]

Documentary film credits include 2014's A Tale Of Two Thieves, written by Erin Donovan, and Juvenile Liaison 2 by Nick Broomfield. She has also worked as a search consultant on Hanratty: The Mystery of Dead Man's Hill, produced by Bob Woffinden as part of the True Stories series.

Bruce acted as a consultant social worker when Caradoc King of United Artists wrote his book The Problem Child.^[4] Bruce undertook all of the background research and facilitated reuniting Caradoc with his family. Katherine Norbury also instructed the services of Bruce when tracking down her birth parents for her book The Fish Ladder, published in 2015 by Bloomsbury.^[5] British Journalist Kate Adie also instructed Bruce's help when researching her memoir Nobody's Child.^[6]

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