An adopted woman who searched for her parents for nearly a decade made the shocking discovery that her biological father had in fact been her friend on Facebook for three years.
Tamuna Museridze is a Georgian journalist who set up a Facebook group in 2021 to try and find her own family.
In 2016, the woman who raised Tamuna died and while clearing out her house she found a birth certificate with her name but the wrong birth date.
She suspected she may be adopted and founded the Facebook group Vedzeb – meaning ‘I’m searching’ – to find her biological parents.
Her search led her to uncover a huge baby trafficking scandal in Georgia that affected thousands of Georgian families.
The investigation found that for more than three decades, thousands of families in Georgia were given the devastating news that their babies had died at birth.
The reality, however, was that the newborns were being 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 concealed a pregnancy and gave birth in September 1984, around the time Tamuna was born.
Georgian journalist Tamuna Museridze set up a Facebook group to help people searching for their biological children
She uncovered a huge baby trafficking scandal in Georgia when trying to search for her own biological parents
However, when she tried to contact her birth mother, the woman screamed and told Tamuna she had never had a child.
She then put out an appeal on Facebook asking if anyone knew her mother.
A woman replied, saying it was her aunt had concealed 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 for the name of her father, which turned out to be a man named Gurgen Korava.
Tamuna began searching for her father on Facebook. To her shock, Gurgen was already her friend and had been following her story to try and find her father for three years.
‘He didn’t even know my birth mother had been pregnant,’ Tamuna told BBC News. ‘It was a huge surprise for him.’
Tamuna using a website which helps use DNA evidence to reunite family members and search ancestry
Tamuna then arranged to meet her father and travelled 160 miles to his home town of Zugdidi.
She said the moment her father looked at her, he knew she was his daughter.
They caught up and realised they had many similar interests, Gurgen had been a renowned dancer and Tamuna’s daughters both love dancing.
She has since met a whole new family, including half-siblings, aunts and uncles.
After re-connecting with her father, Tamuna finally had a chance to meet her birth mother, thanks to a Police TV company setting up a private meeting.
In this meeting Tamuna discovered that unlike the hundreds of people she has helped reunite, she was not a victim of the baby trafficking scandal and her mother had given her up.
After a brief encounter with Gurgen and overwhelmed by shame, her mother chose to hide her pregnancy.
She travelled to Tblisi under the guise of a surgery and gave birth to Tamuna, she stayed in the city until adoption was arranged.
Tamuna said: ‘It was painful to learn that I spent 10 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 was stolen and they were both victims of the huge scandal.
However Tamuna told her mother it would be unfair to all the parents whose babies were stolen.
She was asked to leave by her mother and the pair have not spoken again.