Teresa Stinson said she had spent her whole life wondering who her birth mother was and why she was given up for adoption 47 years ago. But what she didn’t know until recently was that her birth mother had been searching for her for decades.
Christine “Chris” Shirley, now 66 years old, had often wondered what had happened to her baby girl.
“I gave up hope as the years went on, because I thought, ‘well, when she was in her 30s surely she would want to know ... who her birth parents were,’” Shirley told ABC News' “Nightline.” “And in her 40s ... I was giving up hope.”
But it was her daughter, Teresa, who found her first.
In December 2013, a bill was passed in Ohio that opened adoption records between 1964 and 1996, allowing 400,000 adoptees born in the state a chance to request their birth certificate for the first time ever. The new bill made Ohio the newest state to allow adoptees to have access to their original birth certificates. Birth parents were given a one year period to request that their name be redacted from the birth certificate. Once the period expired, adoptees could request their birth certificates. Currently, only 12 states have open adoption records laws.
Betsie Norris of the Adoption Network Cleveland fought for over two decades to unseal the adoption records in Ohio.
“It’s been surreal,” Norris told “Nightline.” “When the bill finally passed after it having so many times that it went down in flames ... it finally sunk in that this is actually really, really, really happening.”
Two of those adoptees were Teresa Stinson, 47, and her sister Vanessa Navis, 44, who were both adopted by the same couple and grew up in Middlebranch, Ohio. Both came from different birth parents and said they had a happy childhood, but always knew they were adopted and had questions.
“Just millions of questions,” Teresa said. “Where did I come from? Did my birth mother ever think about me?”
When her adopted mother told Teresa that her birth mother loved her but couldn’t take care of her, Teresa said it was difficult for her to take in.
“Even as a young child ... I so internalized that and it became a point that I had a really bad self-image, and I was never good enough,” she said.
But it wasn’t until last month after the new law in Ohio went into effect that she had the first opportunity to find her birth mother because the records were sealed before.
Teresa, now married with two kids, also never thought that her birth mother would be looking for her all these years.
“It was easier for me to believe that I wasn’t good enough,” she said. “It would almost be too painful for me to hope, to have that hope that, ‘gosh, she might be out there looking for me.’”
When the law passed, Teresa applied for her original birth certificate -- she was issued a new one when she was adopted that included her birth date but not who her birth parents were. Meanwhile, her sister Vanessa started looking online and found the first clue to Teresa’s past in a post on an adoption registry website for birth mothers looking for daughter given up for adoption.
“I came across this adoption registry website and I thought ... ‘I’ll type in Teresa’s birth date,’” Vanessa said. “And then on that registry was her birth mother’s name and that she had registered in 2001. ... I just said, ‘hey, I think I found your birth mother,’ and she’s like, ‘what?’”
The post revealed that Teresa’s birth mother had attended Lake High School more than 40 years ago -- the same school where Teresa’s son was now a student.
So, Teresa and her husband went to Lake High School to look through old yearbooks from 1964 to 1967, hoping to find an old portrait of her birth mother.
“The first thing I wanted to do is look at pictures and see kind of what their lives were like in high school and see if I can glean anything from that, see if I was maybe really ... like her, if we had anything in common,” Teresa said.
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