DNA test helps reunite mother with daughter she thought died
A DNA test has helped reunite a mother and daughter after nearly 70 years by uncovering a startling secret: A baby girl long thought to be dead was alive, and had been covertly adopted by a family in Southern California that lied about her origins.
The girl, Connie Moultroup, 69, met her birth mother for the first time this month.
“I was absolutely floored,” she said, upon discovering that her mother, Genevieve Purinton, 88, was living in Tampa, Fla.
Purinton was similarly shocked. After giving birth in 1949, she said, she was told her newborn had died.
When they met for the first time on Dec. 3, the connection “was almost instantaneous,” said Moultroup, a massage therapist who travelled to Florida from her hometown in Richmond, Vt.
As they hugged, Moultroup recalled, her mother looked at her and said, “You’re not dead.” They both cried.
“It was a bawlfest,” Moultroup said. “She was so happy to meet me.”
They found each other after Moultroup took an Ancestry.com DNA test that led her to a cousin, who in turn led Moultroup to her birth mother.
CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist and founder of The DNA Detectives, said the two women are “far from alone.”
“It is clear that many unscrupulous, cruel individuals fraudulently separated mothers from their children for profit, believing no one would ever discover their crimes,” she said.
Purinton was 18 and unwed when she became pregnant in her hometown, La Porte, Ind. She had already picked out a name if the baby was a girl: Margaret Ann, after one of her favourite high school teachers, who had polio, she said.
As Moultroup understood it, “She wanted me to be tough, and this Margaret Ann was tough.”
Purinton said she was alone when she gave birth on May 12, 1949, at a hospital in Gary, Ind. She never saw the baby.
“I was told it was a girl, but she died,” Purinton said.
She did not argue or ask to see a death certificate.
“Who at 18 would think about something like that?” she asked.
Between 1945 and 1973, the year Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, hundreds of thousands of young women were forced to give up their newborn children, Ann Fessler reported in her awardwinning book, “The Girls Who Went Away.”
Purinton said she could not recall the name of the hospital where she had given birth. According to adoption paperwork obtained by Moultroup, she was delivered at St. Mary’s Mercy Hospital, a Catholic hospital in Gary that no longer exists.
The adoption documents, which Moultroup retrieved from the adoptions and abandonment unit at the Edmund D. Edelman Children’s Court in Los Angeles County, showed that a doctor had arranged the adoption.
Within the paperwork she found her mother’s signature.
Purinton recalled having signed papers at the hospital, but that she assumed they were meant to provide a directive in the event she died or could no longer care for her baby. “I had no idea what I signed,” she said.
Before being reunited with her daughter, Purinton thought she was the last surviving member of her immediate family. Her parents and all eight of her siblings had died, and she did not have any children — or so she thought.
At that time there was a “huge stigma” about unmarried pregnant women and children born out of wedlock, said Ryan Hanlon, vice-president of the National Council for Adoption.
“There was a lot of secrecy around adoption,” Hanlon said. “It’s the opposite of what we do now.”