Georgian woman looking for birth parents found dad was a friend on Facebook

Tamuna Museridze took a deep breath and made the phone call she had dreamed of since finding out that she might be adopted.

She was calling the woman she believed was her biological mother. She knew it might not lead to a fairy tale reunion – but she didn’t expect the response to be cold and angry.

“She started screaming, shouting – she said she hadn’t given birth to a child. She didn’t want anything to do with me,” Tamuna recalls, explaining she felt more surprised than upset by the response.

“I was ready for anything, but her reaction was beyond anything I could imagine.”

Tamuna wasn’t prepared to walk away just yet. She wanted to know the circumstances of her adoption, and there was something else she wanted that only her mother could give her – the name of her father.

Tamuna’s search had begun in 2016, after the woman who raised her died. Clearing out her house, Tamuna found a birth certificate with her own name on it but the wrong birth date, and she started to suspect she was adopted. After doing some research, she set up a Facebook group called Vedzeb, or I’m Searching, hoping to find her birth parents.

Instead, she uncovered a baby trafficking scandal in Georgia that has affected tens of thousands of lives. Over many decades, parents were lied to and told their newborn babies had died – the infants were then sold.

Tamuna is a journalist and her work has reunited hundreds of families, yet – until now – she couldn’t solve the mystery of her own origins and wondered if she too had been stolen as a child.

“I was a journalist on this story, but it was a personal mission for me as well,” she says.