Adopted woman looking for parents found she was already friends with her dad
An adopted woman searching for her birth parents for eight years found she had been Facebook friends with her biological dad for three years.
Georgian journalist Tamuna Museridze had set up a Facebook page to find her own birth family but also help reunite other adopted children with theirs.
Her search led her to discover a massive baby trafficking scandal in Georgia that had affected thousands of lives.
For more than three decades huge numbers of parents had been told that their babies had died at birth, when in fact they had been trafficked on the black market.
Tamuna’s Facebook group helped reunite several families but she was struggling to find her own.
The 40-year-old grew up unaware she was adopted, but when her mother died in 2016 she was clearing her house and found a birth certificate with Tamuna’s name but a different birth date.
She suspected she may have been adopted and began what would become an eight year search, the BBC reports.
Finally this summer, she received a message on Facebook from a person who said they knew a woman who concealed a pregnancy and gave birth in September 1984, around the time Tamuna was born.
However when she tried to contact her birth mother the woman screamed and told Tamuna she had never had a child.
She then put out an appeal on Facebook asking if anyone knew her mother.
A woman replied, saying it was her aunt had concealed the pregnancy and agreed to take a DNA test.
When the test arrived, it confirmed that Tamuna and the woman on Facebook were cousins, meaning the woman Tamuna had called was indeed her mother.
She asked her mother for the name of her father, which turned out to be a man named Gurgen Korava.
Tamuna began searching for her father on Facebook. To her surprise, Gurgen was already her friend and had been following her story to try and find her father for three years.
Tamuna then arranged to meet him and travelled 160miles to his hometown of Zugdidi.
(Picture AFP or licensors)
She said the moment her father looked at her, he knew she was his daughter.
They caught up and realised they had many similar interests, Gurgen had been a renowned dancer and Tamuna’s daughters both love dancing.
He said he had had a brief relationship with her biological mother, but had not known she had become pregnant.
Tamuna has since got to know a whole new family, including half-siblings, aunts and uncles.
She also finally had the chance to meet her birth mother, thanks to a Police TV company setting up a private meeting.
She learnt from her mother that unlike the hundreds of people she has helped reunite, she was not a victim of the baby trafficking scandal.
After a brief encounter with Gurgen and overwhelmed by shame, her mother chose to hide her pregnancy.
She travelled to Tblisi under the guise of a surgery and gave birth to Tamuna and stayed in the city until adoption was arranged.
Tamuna said: ‘It was painful to learn that I spent 10 days alone with her before the adoption. I try not to think about that.’
She said her mother asked her to lie and tell the world that she too was stolen and they were both victims of the trafficking scandal.
However Tamuna told her it would be unfair to all the parents whose babies were stolen.
She was asked to leave by her mother and the pair have not spoken again.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.