Mother reunites with daughter she was told died nearly 70 years ago

A mother was reunited with her daughter nearly 70 years after the woman was told her child died at birth.

Just moments after Genevieve Purinton gave birth in an Indiana hospital back in 1949, staff had informed the woman her child didn’t survive.

“I asked to see the baby and they said she died, that’s all I remember,” the now 88-year-old told NBC News.

However, the woman’s daughter, Connie Moultroup, was in fact alive and was taken to an orphanage.

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“That was common practice in the ‘40s and ‘50s,” Moultroup said.

Moultroup, 69, was adopted by a family in Southern California, where she spent most of her childhood before moving to Vermont.

“I’ve looked my whole life trying to find my mother. It was just always a dream I had,” Moultroup told CBS News. “That someday I would meet her and I never in a million years thought it would happen.”

Turns out, Moultroup’s own daughter had purchased a DNA ancestry kit last year as a gift for herself and her mother.

“It was just a cool Christmas present and it has completely changed our lives,” daughter Bonnie Chase told NBC.

The results led her to a distant cousin.

“One of those relatives is a first cousin. And I said, that my mother’s name was this, was Genevieve Mitch,” Moultroup said. “And she said, ‘Oh, that’s my aunt,’ and, ‘Oh, by the way, she’s still alive,’ and I was floored.”

The mother and daughter spoke by telephone in September and were reunited in person on Monday.

“I went right up to her, gave her a big hug and started bawling,” Moultroup told CBS.