Adopted woman discovers Facebook friend is her father
The woman had been searching for her biological parents for years, only to find that her father was already one of her Facebook friends...
Facebook has been known to reunite long-lost high school friends, but a woman from Georgia had no idea that the social media platform would hold the key to her adoption mystery.
Journalist Tamuna Museridze decided to track her biological parents down after the woman she thought was her mother died in 2016.
Speaking to the BBC, Tamuna revealed that she found her birth certificate while clearing her mother's house. It had her name on it, but the birth date was incorrect. This led her to believe that she was adopted, and she decided to do some digging.
Tamuna set up a Facebook group to help her find her birth parents. The group helped uncover shocking details about a baby trafficking ring in Georgia - a transcontinental country in Europe and Asia.
It turns out that scores of families were told that their babies had died at birth when, in fact, they had been trafficked on the black market.
Tamuna's Facebook group helped many people reunite with their families. However, she was unable to find her parents. That was until she received a message from a woman who said her aunt had a concealed pregnancy and gave birth in September 1984, which is when she was born.
She believed Tamuna could be that aunt's child and agreed to do a DNA test. While waiting for the results, Tamuna decided to give the woman a call.
“She started screaming, shouting - she said she hadn’t given birth to a child. She didn't want anything to do with me. I was ready for anything, but her reaction was beyond anything I could imagine," she told the BBC.
Dejected but not deterred, Tamuna still hoped to find out if her adoption was the result of the baby trafficking scandal. The DNA test results arrived a week later, and she learned that the person who reached out to her on Facebook was her cousin.
She then contacted her birth mother to give her the results. Tamuna convinced her to reveal her father's name. She found him on Facebook and was shocked that they were already friends on the platform. He friended her three years earlier after becoming intrigued by the work she was doing with Georgia's stolen children.
"He didn’t even know my birth mother had been pregnant. It was a huge surprise for him."
They decided to meet, and the rest was history. "It was strange, the moment he looked at me, he knew that I was his daughter. I had so many mixed emotions.”
Tamuna also met with her half-sister and other family members.
She eventually got the chance to come face to face with her biological mother in October, who told her that she was not trafficked. Her mother had willingly given her up for adoption after keeping her pregnancy a secret.
Tamuna didn't get the same happy ending she received with her father. Her mother allegedly told her to lie and say she was one of Georgia's trafficked newborns.
Tamuna refused, and her mother asked her to leave. They have not spoken since.
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