family reunification

"This true story chronicles what happened after a mother gorilla gave birth for the first time and then walked away from her newborn baby at Seattle's Woodland Park. The dedicated staff worked tirelessly to find innovative ways for mother and baby to build a relationship. The efforts were ultimately successful, as baby Yola bonded with her mother and the rest of the family group"--Publisher.

From the 1920s through 1950, Georgia Tann ran a black-market baby business at the Tennessee Children's Home Society in Memphis. She offered up more than 5,000 orphans tailored to the wish lists of eager parents--hiding the fact that many weren't orphans at all, but stolen children of poor families, desperate single mothers, and women told in maternity words that their babies died. The publication of Lisa Wingate's novel Before We Were Yours brought new awareness of Tann's lucrative career in child trafficking. Adoptees who knew little about their pasts gained insight into the startling facts behind their family histories. Encouraged by their contact with Wingate and award-winning journalist Judy Christie, who documented the fifteen family stories in this book, many determined survivors set out to trace their roots and find their families. Often raised by older parents as only children, many have joyfully reunited with siblings in the final decades of their lives. Wingate and Christie tell of first meetings that are all the sweeter and more intense for time missed, and of families from very different social backgrounds reaching out to embrace better-late-than-never brothers, sisters, and cousins. In a poignant culmination of art-meets-life, long silent victims of the tragically corrupt system return to Memphis with the authors to reclaim their stories at a Tennessee Children's Home Society reunion . . . with extraordinary results.

"Joy works the graveyard shift at a grocery store outside Boston and nurses an addiction to cough syrup. Then a sickness that begins with memory loss and ends with death sweeps the country, and for the first time in her life, Joy has an advantage: she is immune. This gains her admittance to a hospital in rural Kansas and a chance to escape her bleak existence. As winter descends, the hospital's fragile order breaks down and Joy breaks free, embarking on a journey to Florida to find her birth mother, the woman who abandoned her as a child."--Back cover.

Ho Chi Min City, 1981. When four-year-old Van woke up one morning, her mother and three siblings were gone. Van didn't think too much of it until later in the day, when her grandmother said they weren't coming back.

Imagine opening Facebook one day and finding a message that says "I think we might be twins." Which is exactly what happened to Samantha Futerman, a then twenty-five-year-old actress who was raised in New Jersey. Adopted from South Korea as an infant, Sam grew up with her parents and two American-born brothers. Until she was contacted by Anais Bordier, who grew up in France, she never imagined she had a sister. As Anais' identical face looked back at her from Facebook, she was stunned. A YouTube video of Samantha was what brought the two together. Anais, too, had been adopted as an infant from South Korea. As they talked, they realized they shared a sense of humor, giddy laughter, expressions, ideals, a need to sleep ten hours a night, and the same birth date. Although they grew up in different countries, they discovered that nothing can disrupt the unbreakable bond between sisters.