A journalist in the nation of Georgia has shared details about the journey to find her birth parents, including the surprise that she had already been Facebook friends with her birth father for three years.
Tamuna Museridze first realized she was adopted in 2016 when she found a birth certificate with her name, but a different date of birth. The woman who had been raising her had recently died, and Museridze began the search for her biological family. She set up a Facebook page dedicated to the search, and that was where she received a message from a woman who ended up being her first cousin.
The woman shared that her aunt had given birth in 1984 but had concealed the pregnancy and the birth. A DNA test confirmed that this woman was indeed Museridze’s first cousin, and therefore, the aunt was Museridze’s birth mother. However, the birth mother wasn’t interested in a mother/daughter reunion, as Museridze learned when she called her.
“She was 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,” Museridze told the BBC.
About a week later, her birth mother gave her the name of her birth father: Gurgen Khorava.
“I couldn’t believe these things were happening to me. I couldn’t believe I had found them,” Museridze said.
She turned to Facebook to begin her search for her father, and quickly realized he had been following her story via the Facebook page she had set up to find her biological parents.
“[He had] been in my friend list for three years,” she explained. “He didn’t even know my birth mother had been pregnant. It was a huge surprise for him.”
Father and daughter arranged a meeting, and soon Museridze was meeting her half-siblings and cousins. “Out of all his children, I look the most like my father,” she said.
In addition to finding her birth family, Museridze also exposed a widespread baby trafficking scandal in Georgia. Over decades, parents were told their newborns had died, but they had actually been sold. It made Museridze wonder if she had been stolen as well. Eventually, her birth mother told her that she had been ashamed to be pregnant and unmarried, so she had traveled to give birth, and hid her daughter’s existence from everyone.
Incredibly, through her Facebook group, Muzeridze helped other children find their families, reuniting them with the parents from whom they had been stolen at birth.
[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by Live Action News.]
