DNA connects Daughter with Mother
“A biological mother and daughter, ages 100 and 79, who each thought the other was dead, have reunited after learning they’re both very much alive and living within two hours of each other in South Florida, thanks to a DNA analysis service.
The story is made even more miraculous by the fact that both Joanne Loewenstern and her newly discovered mother, Lillian (Feinsilver) Ciminieri are from the New York area, yet somehow each found their way to the Sunshine State.
After meeting for the first time on Sunday, the families learned that both women were under the impression that the other had died during Joanne’s birth at the Bellevue Hospital in the Bronx in 1938.
That proved to be very far from the truth, and Joanne had her suspicions, all along.
‘I had a feeling she was alive somehow,’ she told The Washington Post. ‘I just felt that I didn’t believe it for some reason.’
Their meeting was a bit awkward at first, with Joanne unsure if her mother had the ability to understand what she was saying or recognize her, as she has dementia.
‘I don’t know if she recognizes me,’ Joanne said of her mother, at their first meeting, after her son, Elliott, urged her to give Lillian a hug.
After a bit of waiting, she said, ‘Hi, I’m Joanne. Do you know who I am? Do you recognize my picture from any place?’
‘I was adopted in 1938,’ she went on, ‘after my birth mother, they told me, passed away. I don’t know how true that is.’
With little encouragement coming from Lillian, Joanne started to tear up, and that’s when her mother reacted.
In addition to her son, Elliott, Joanne had his wife, Shelley, and one grandson there, with her other grandchildren on video over smart phones.
Lillian’s son Sam, who had helped arrange this meeting through Shelley, was also there with his ex-wife, who cares for Lillian.
Introductions were made and Lillian smiled, before finally speaking into the phone, ‘How are you?’ to one of her newly-realized great grandchildren.
And then finally, Lillian said, ‘This is my daughter.’
Any difficulties in communicating that day, however, paled in comparison to the journey it took to get there.
Joanne learned she had been adopted when she was 16 years old, by a loving foster family in proceedings that were finalized two months after she was born.
It was then, in the late 1950s, that she was told a woman named Lillian Feinsliver had died while giving birth to her in New York, but something told her that might not be quite right.
After a lifetime of feeling like she didn’t quite fit in, and one failed attempted at finding her biological mother through a private investigator, Joanne had all but given up.
‘I said, “You know what, I’m done,”‘she said. ‘Sure, I cried, because you know, I felt like I didn’t belong in anyone’s circle, and that was it.’
A defeated-feeling Joanne had taken to watching the TLC show, ‘Long Lost Family,’ at her home in Boca, where she had moved in 1992. On that show, adopted or estranged family members are reunited with their loved ones after spending entire lifetimes apart.
The entire show was centered around the unfulfilled dream that Joanne had always had.
Finally, her daughter-in-law, Shelley (who is married toJoanne’s son, Elliott), encouraged her to submit her DNA to an ancestry analysis site.
On May 13, Shelley got a message through Ancestry DNA that a match came back for a close relative, named Sam Ciminieri. He’s Joanne’s biological brother.
Sam reached out and revealed to Shelley that not only was his mother alive, but she was living just 70 miles away from Joanne, in an assisted living facility in Port St. Lucie, Florida.
The families moved fast, and a meeting was arranged on Sunday. During their visit, Sam’s ex-wife revealed to Shelley that Lillian was a single mother when Joanne was born, and it seemed she was taken from Lillian without her consent.
That’s when it hit Shelley that both women had been told a false story.
‘Both of them went through life thinking the other had died,’ she said.
With that in the past now, the mother and daughter were able to bond a bit over a mutual love of coloring.
‘This had gone on for so many years,’ Joanne said. ‘I felt like I came this far, and I looked at her and I was very, very happy.’
Joanne has already been back to visit Lillian, making her most recent trip to Port St. Lucie on Wednesday, when she said her mother seemed to really know it was her.
This time, Lillian kept saying, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ ”
[Daily Mail 6/29/18 by Stephanie Haney]
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