After the birth of her first son, the desire to find out more about her background became "hard to ignore"; she also wanted him to "know his heritage". Investigations took Mealing to New York, where she eventually found her birth mother, a model for Biba in London during the swinging sixties. She discovered that her biological father was a half-Ghanaian poet and activist. She gets on well with her mother and takes the children to visit her in New York but her father died some years earlier. She also found out that she has a sister, a year younger, also adopted in Britain. Her sister did not know of the relationship until she was 16, but had watched Mealing in "Grange Hill", with people saying 'you look like that girl on TV'. Now close, when they first met their similarities were unbelievable — "we talk the same, walk the same, even our actions are the same".