Lena Pierce, 96, was recently reunited with her first-born Betty Morrell, who she hadn’t seen since she was born 82 years ago.
According to WBNG news, Lena gave birth to a baby girl, Eva, when she was 14-years-old. After caring for her newborn baby for six months, the state of New York deemed her unfit as a mother and took her baby away from her.
The little baby Eva was adopted to a family in Long Island, and renamed Betty, where she lived as an only child. At the age of 21 her adoptive mother passed away and shortly afterwards so did her adoptive father.
Betty spent the next 50 years trying to track down her birth mother, during which time, Lena had married twice and had seven other children.
But she said that she never stopped thinking about her first-born baby, explaining: “There was a lot of times I worried about her and wondered where she was.”
With the help of her granddaughter, Betty was able to track her family line through ancestry.com and also from some information she had gleaned from her aunt about her birth mother. She eventually was able to make contact with Millie, one of Lena’s daughters, and then her mother.
“There was no connection. Nothing to tie me to anybody,” Morrell recalls, “And so, ya know, when it came through, and she was alive, and I had been talking to her on the phone… it was like, it’s all gone! My life is complete at this point.”
Watch the moment they were reunited in person here:
Images and video via WBNG.
