Photo:Credit: MyHeritage.com
Credit: MyHeritage.com
After 42 years, Jimmy Lippert Thyden finally embraced his birth mother for the first time.
Last week, the Virginia criminal defense attorney was reunited with Maria Angelica Gonzalez in Chile, more than four decades after hospital workers there told the woman that her son died after she gave birth, according tothe Associated Press.
On Aug. 17, the mother and son began to make up for lost time in Valdivia, Chile.
“Te amo mucho,” Thyden told her,according toUSA Today. “I love you so much.”
“It’s a miracle from God,” Gonzalez, 69, told the newspaper. “When I learned that he was alive, I couldn’t believe it.”
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The journey toward the happy moment began in April, when Thyden learned about Nos Buscamos, a Chilean nonprofit that is dedicated to reuniting Chilean-born adoptees with their birth parents, he told the news outlet.
“The paperwork I have for my adoption tells me I have no living relatives. And I learned in the last few months that I have a mama and I have four brothers and a sister,” Thyden told the AP.
Thyden took the MyHeritage DNA test to confirm his Chilean origin. Nos Buscamos teamed up with MyHeritage to provide Chelean adoptees and suspected victims of child trafficking in Chile with at-home DNA testing kits. Thyden’s test confirmed he is 100% Chilean after he matched with a first cousin who also used MyHeritage.
The Virginia man’s story is the latest in a series of such emotional reunions.
Aware of their Chilean roots, the Nardis began to dig further after their adoptive mother saw a news story last December aboutTexas firefighter Tyler Grafand other stolen children of Chile.
Tyler Graf grew up in suburban St. Paul, Minnesota, but it took more than three decades for him to discover the shocking truth of his adoption — he, like thousands of other babies in Chile in the ’70s and ’80s, had been stolen from his birth parents.
Graf told PEOPLE last year that it is his mission to help others like him through his organizationConnecting Roots.
“Seeing the happiness that this creates when these two families meet for the first time, to know that there was a lifetime of pain that is now going to be patched, it’s incredible,” Graf told PEOPLE.
source: people.com
