Adopted Woman Finds Mom After Facebook Photo Goes Viral

[Bea Sunny (:]

After 8 heartbreaking years of searching, a simple Facebook photo helped Kelly Baumgartner get in contact with her birth mother in just 44 days
“It was a fluke,” 28-year-old Kelley Baumgartner tells Yahoo Parenting of getting into contact with the birth mother she had been searching for since she was a teenager. The pair made contact on March 16, just 44 days after Baumgartner posted a photo of herself detailing the search on Facebook. “A friend of mine told me about someone she knew who made a sign and posted it and I thought, ‘What the heck, I’m just going to do it.’”
Today she’s happy to report that, “I’m ecstatic! Finding her is something that I’ve always wanted in my life.”

Before that Facebook post though, the Jacksonville, Fla. stay-at-home, married mother-of-three had exhausted the search for her biological mother, unknown to her, other than the fact that the woman who gave her up in South Bend, Indiana in 1987 was a hairdresser in her 20s with seven siblings.
With the support of her adoptive parents Becky and Sam Huston, Baumgartner started looking for her birth mom as soon as she was legally able. “I always wanted to know about her,” says Baumgartner, who moved with her family including brother Kevin, also adopted, to Jacksonville when she was 3. “I felt it desperately when I turned 13 but I had to be 21 to legally search.” And even then she hit a dead end.
Indiana law, reports the Elkhart Truth, doesn’t entitle adoptees to access birth certificates or identifying information in closed adoptions, such as Baumgartner’s.

“I hired a company to help me back in 2006,” she says. “I paid $4,000 up front and two years later they sent me letter that they just couldn’t find anything. I was crushed. It took me months to move on. I thought if a company like this couldn’t find her, what could I do?”

https://www.yahoo.com/parenting/adopted-woman-finds-mom-after-facebook-photo-goes-115969176297.html

Thoughts?

 

[Jazzy]

Very happy for her and very happy her adopted parents were so supportive in her quest to find her birth mother.

This part from the article just goes to show that adoption was a way better choice than abortion for this birth mother:

The two are planning to meet up in person for the first time on Mother’s Day in Florida. “She’s flying in with my family,” says Baumgartner. “I have family.”

And she plans to bring her birth mother a special gift at their holiday reunion. “I want to make her a scrapbook,” she says. “I have wanted to do that since I was a teenager. I want to fill it with all my baby photos and pictures to show her what she did — to thank her,” Baumgartner explains. “My parents suffered years of infertility and I want to thank her for sacrificing her body for someone she wasn't even going to keep. I need to tell her thank you and that I’m OK. I couldn't have done any of this, my life, without her.”

 

[mrldii]

Awwwww...I love stories of social media actually doing good, in the world!!!