An astonishing twist of fate, a Georgia woman recently discovered that her Facebook friend for three years was indeed her biological father. The discovery came in the course of an extended search for birth parents which started in 2016 after the death of the woman who raised her.
Tamuna Museridze’s quest to find her biological family began when she found her birth certificate among the items she was cleaning up in her late mother’s house. She found an inconsistency between her birth date and what it had on the document, making her suspect that she might be adopted. With this knowledge, Museridze started a Facebook group called Vedzeb, or “I’m Searching”, to help her with her quest to find her birth parents.
A step forward in Museridze’s journey was made a couple of months ago when she got an email from a woman who said that she lived in rural Georgia. The woman revealed that her aunt had hidden a pregnancy in Tbilisi in September of 1984, as when Museridze was born. After several conversations, she agreed to undergo a DNA test to confirm the connection.
During the period of waiting for the results, Museridze asked her adoptive mother for answers. But her conversation took an unexpected turn.
Museridze remembered the emotional telephone call with her mother: “She started screaming, shouting—she said she hadn’t given birth to a child. She didn’t want anything to do with me.” Museridze was left emotionally shaken by the intensity of her mother’s reaction. “I was ready for anything, but her reaction was beyond anything I could imagine,” Museridze said.
One week later, the DNA test confirmed that Museridze was actually cousins with the lady on Facebook. Museridze armed with the new information, then confronted her mother for a third time and eventually managed to make her tell the name of the birth father as Gurgen Khorava.
Museridze then found Khorava on Facebook and, to her surprise, he had been following her story online for years. “He had been in my friend list for three years,” Museridze shared. “He didn’t even know my birth mother had been pregnant. It was a huge surprise for him.”
Museridze, with Khorava’s name in hand, traveled to his hometown and met him, and on meeting him, she got to know her half-siblings and cousins. She was shocked at how much she looked like her father compared to the rest of his children.
Museridze learned that her mother had kept her pregnancy a secret because of the shame of having a child out of wedlock. She traveled to another city to give birth in secret, hiding the pregnancy from everyone, including her family.
Reflecting on the unexpected twists that have brought her to this remarkable reunion, Museridze said with astonishment at how things changed so that she could meet her real father and family at last.
