Having children is a difficult and often painstaking task for some of us, and those who are trying to be a parent may find that there are a lot more pitfalls out there than is popularly discussed.
It can often result in young parents being forced to give away their children, sometimes with the adoption settled even before the birth is due.
After all, there is a reason for the various babies that are in need of adoption into loving homes and families.
That doesn’t, however, mean that both parent and child have given up searching for each other, or hoping to find their missing biological family member someday.
18-year-old Genevieve Purinton was an unwedded young woman who had found herself pregnant with a child in the year 1949.
Despite the obvious difficulties she would be facing as a single mother in the late 40s and early 50s, Purinton was determined to keep the baby and raise it the best she could.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t even given the luxury of having that choice.
Medical staff in the Indiana hospital she delivered her baby told her that the newborn child had passed away at birth.
She wasn’t even allowed to see the baby after she gave birth to it, let alone hold the corpse, as the baby was whisked away almost immediately afterwards.
That baby would turn out to be the only child she would ever have for the rest of her life, as Purinton was forced to undergo hysterectomy a few years later after a tumor threatened her health.
As it turned out, the newborn baby was actually alive and healthy.
The girl, later named Connie Moultroup, and her mother were the victim of a common practice at the time.
These children were forcefully separated from their unwedded mothers and given up for adoption without the birth mother’s consent, usually leaving the mother permanently traumatised in some way.
This horrifying historical practice would later be documented by author Ann Fessler in a book titled The Girls Who Went Away, who was one of the many victims of this practice herself.
Moultroup was later placed in an orphanage, where she would be adopted by a pair of prospective parents who brought her into their home in Santa Barbara, California.
This arrangement, however, was not to last, and at age 5 she would be motherless once more when her adoptive parents pass away.
Her adoptive father remarried, and Moultroup had to deal with an abusive mother for the rest of her childhood.
Purinton and Moultroup’s story, however, was to have a happy ending.
In Christmas of 2017, Moultroup received an Ancestry.com DNA testing kit from her adult daughter, Bonnie Chase.
With some effort, Moultroup found her world blown wide open, and went from only knowing her daughter and two grandchildren as her blood relatives to 1,600 people – including her birth mother.
After 69 years, Moultroup finally met the 88-year-old woman living on her own in an assisted living facility in Florida, where the two had a happy reunion.
SEE ALSO: Couple Served In WWII Together, Married For 7 Decades, Die The Same Day After Taking Their Last Nap
