A 90-year-old Louisiana woman who put her newborn up for adoption more than 70 years ago has been reunited with her daughter thanks to a DNA test.
Elizabeth Pullen of Lafayette said she never thought she would see her daughter again after giving her up for adoption in 1948 while living in North Carolina. Pullen moved to Louisiana years later but never gave up hope of reuniting with her baby girl, she told KATC.
“She’s definitely my daughter,” Pullen told the station. “She’s definitely my lost daughter.”
Pullen’s granddaughter, Wanda LeBlanc, received a DNA kit last Christmas, and the results led the family to her closest match, a woman named Lynne Wray, 70, whom LeBlanc had never previously heard of.
“I just emailed her right away,” LeBlanc told the station. “I had to know who she was.”
LeBlanc then discovered that Wray was her aunt — and Pullen’s daughter.
Wray later got the call she had been waiting her entire life to receive, she told the station.
“I got a phone call from my mother and she said, ‘I’m your mother, and you’re my daughter,’” Wray recalled.
Wray then flew to Louisiana within a month of the call and later met Pullen for the first time at a park in Lafayette on May 6. They stood back-to-back before dramatically turning around to get that first glimpse, video shows.
“I thought we were never going to turn around,” Wray told the station earlier this month.
Wray said completed her DNA four years ago to complete her medical history and had no idea that it would one day change her life forever.
“I got so much more than what I was looking for,” she said.