An adopted woman who had been searching for her parents for nearly a decade made the shocking discovery that her biological father had been her friend on Facebook for three years.
Tamuna Museridze is a Georgian journalist who set up a Facebook group in 2021 to find her own parents.
In 2016, the woman who raised Tamuna had died and while cleaning out her house she found a birth certificate with her name but the wrong date of birth.
She suspected she might have been adopted and founded the Facebook group Vedzeb – which means ‘I’m looking for’ – to find her biological parents.
Her search led her to uncover a massive baby trafficking scandal in Georgia that affected thousands of Georgian families.
The study found that for more than 30 years, thousands of families in Georgia were told the devastating news that their babies had died at birth.
However, the reality was that the newborns were trafficked on the black market, meaning thousands of Georgians had no idea who their real families were.
Tamuna managed to find her mother after receiving a message from a person who said they knew a woman who hid a pregnancy and gave birth in September 1984, around the time Tamuna was born.
Georgian journalist Tamuna Museridze has set up a Facebook group to help people search for their biological children
She uncovered a huge baby trafficking scandal in Georgia while searching for her own birth parents
However, when she tried to contact her birth mother, the woman screamed and told Tamuna that she never had a child.
She then posted a message on Facebook asking if anyone knew her mother.
A woman responded, saying her aunt hid the pregnancy and agreed to take a DNA test.
When the test arrived, it confirmed that Tamuna and the woman on Facebook were cousins, meaning the woman Tamuna had called was indeed her mother.
She asked her mother the name of her father, who turned out to be a man named Gurgen Korava.
Tamuna started searching for her father on Facebook. To her horror, Gurgen was already her friend and had been following her story for three years in an attempt to find her father.
“He didn’t even know my birth mother was pregnant,” Tamuna said BBC news. “It was a big surprise for him.”
Tamuna uses a website that uses DNA evidence to reunite family members and search for ancestors
Tamuna then arranged to meet her father and traveled 260 miles to his hometown of Zugdidi.
She said as soon as her father looked at her, he knew she was his daughter.
They caught up and realized they had many similar interests: Gurgen had been a well-known dancer and Tamuna’s daughters both like to dance.
Since then, she has met a whole new family, including half-siblings, uncles and aunts.
After reconnecting with her father, Tamuna finally got the chance to meet her birth mother, thanks to a police TV company that arranged a private meeting.
During this meeting, Tamuna discovered that unlike the hundreds of people she helped reunite, she was not a victim of the baby trafficking scandal and that her mother had given her up.
After briefly meeting Gurgen and overcome with shame, her mother chose to hide her pregnancy.
She traveled to Tbilisi under the guise of surgery and gave birth to Tamuna. She remained in town until the adoption was arranged.
Tamuna said: ‘It was painful to hear that I had spent ten days alone with her before the adoption. I try not to think about that.’
She said her mother asked her to lie and tell the world that she too had been stolen and that they were both victims of the huge scandal.
However, Tamuna told her mother that it would be unfair to all the parents whose babies were stolen.
Her mother asked her to leave and the couple did not speak again.