After spending years searching for her birth mom, Laurie Joncas met Ann Blodgett in an emotional reunion on a South Carolina beach.
For decades, Laurie Joncas wondered what her biological mother looked like — did they share the same eyes or the same smile?
"I had a great family, so I'm thankful for that, but I wondered: Do I look like her?" Joncas, 54, told InsideEdition.com. "I wanted to figure out what nationality I was and what she looked like."
Joncas was adopted when she was just five days old from Allegheny Hospital in Pittsburgh in September of 1965. Her adoptive parents had lost their biological son, Scott, just a few days after he was born, and a member of their church had told them about baby Laurie.
After a closed adoption, Joncas grew up in their happy and loving home. But she always wondered where her biological mother might be.
She said she wrote to judges and even called the lawyer who had handled her closed adoption, but Joncas had no luck in finding any information about her biological mom.
"Nobody would help me, so I just came to a point in my life where I would have to accept that I probably would never meet her," Joncas said.
Little did she know that her mother, Ann Blodgett, was also looking for her.
"I had looked for her forever, but it was a closed adoption, so I was never able to get any information," Blodgett, 73, told InsideEdition.com. "Sixteen years ago, I had breast cancer and thought this was important that she had this information, and I was still told absolutely not."
Blodgett was young and unmarried when she became pregnant with Laurie and had chosen to give her up for adoption.
Joncas, now living in Milwaukee, had all but given up on finding her mom when her brother got her a DNA testing kit for Christmas in 2016. Through the site, she was surprised to find a first cousin. She connected with her biological mother's niece.
"The niece emailed me and said, 'I have an aunt who had a baby in 1965 and she had to give the baby away and we think you're that girl!'" Joncas said. "I lost it, I was screaming, can you imagine? It was crazy! I just cried and cried and cried and I called her for the first time on Mother's Day."
After speaking by phone throughout the spring of 2017, mother and daughter decided to meet face to face on the beach near Blodgett's home in Conway, South Carolina. The family filmed their emotional reunion, which they recently decided to share on social media.
Now that they are connected, the two speak by phone or text every single day and see each other in person as much as they can.
"It has changed my life. I have friends down here who have said they have never seen me smile as much as I do now," Blodgett said. "We're trying to make up for lost time."
And neither mom nor daughter can believe how many similarities — and how much love — they share.
"I was loved and I was blessed with a wonderful family, but to see somebody that I look like, it was incredible," Joncas said. "We stand like each other, we have the same mannerisms, it's really, really weird and cool."
RELATED STORIES
