After 63 years, a mother who was forced to give up her firstborn daughter for adoption has found her through Facebook, inviting the single child into an instant family with four siblings and almost a dozen nieces and nephews.
With more than 750 million users, Facebook is bound to include long lost relatives and connections within a few degrees of separation. And in this case, it led to good news.
All Facebook, with reporting from Sacramento-based News10-ABC, gives us a story that reads like something out of "Cold Case": That as a 17-year-old in 1948, unwed teen Helen Torres was forced to give up her firstborn daughter Christina. But it was a loss she never got over. She raised five children after that. One passed away, but the four surviving siblings also joined in their mother's search for their big sister.
Torres kept up with her daughter, from a distance, until she was about 12, then lost track.
Her youngest child, Deneen, took up the cause for years working off a birth certificate and marriage license, but always hit a dead end. So she turned to a "longshot": Facebook. She created a page with her sister's birthdate (March 8, 1948) and her name (Mary Christine Bustamante).
She posted this at the end of January as a way of finding her:
My sister's name is Mary Christine Bustamante. She was born 3/8/1948 in Los Angeles, CA and adopted by Ralph and Anna Bustamante at birth, lived on Eddystone St in Whittier, CA as a child. Married James Woodrow Gray on Nov. 12, 1966 at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Whittier. Separated in the 1970's. Her best friend growing up was Barbara Morasky of Pico Rivera, CA. Does anyone know where she is? Her birth family has been searching for her for over 30 yrs and have had no luck. If you know her, could you please tell her that her birth family is searching for her or let her birth family know where she is. This picture is the only one we have of her. She is 62 yrs. old now.
By April, the search had led to Chris Gray, of Riverside. She talked to Deneen Torres, who realized she had finally found her sister. Gray had never been told by the couple that raised her that she was adopted, and with them deceased, thought she was alone in the world without any more family.
She visited in June, finally getting to meet her mother, Helen.
Now, she's moving to Yuba City to be with her family.
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Check out Technolog on Facebook, and on Twitter, follow Athima Chansanchai, who is also trying to keep her head above water in the Google+ stream.