Adopted Woman Who Was Told Biological Mom Had Passed Away Finally Meets Her Nearly 80 Years Later

Nov 11, 2021 by apost team

Some children who enter the foster care system never get a chance to meet their biological parents. That’s what people told Florida resident Joanne Loewenstern her entire life, as she grew up thinking that her mother had died in childbirth. And yet, Loewenstern always had the feeling that somehow her biological mother was still alive, as she details in a 2018 interview with The Washington Post.

It was that conviction that led Loewenstern, who was 79 at the time of this story, to look for her mother despite what she’d been told all her life. But she didn’t have much to go on besides her mother’s name, Lillian Feinsilver, and the hospital where she was born, Bellevue Hospital in New York City.

But Loewenstern didn’t search for her mother out of unhappiness or dissatisfaction with her life as a foster child. Her foster parents, who adopted her just two months after her birth, were loving, and Loewenstern led a successful, happy life.

She married, bought a house in Far Rockaway, Queens, and raised four children while working extra jobs on nights and weekends.

Nonetheless, Loewenstern kept looking for her mother.

Dead end after dead end made her reconsider, however. And after a private detective she hired failed to find her long-lost mom, Loewenstern told The Post that she gave up.

“I said, ‘You know what, I’m done,'” Loewenstern told the publication. “Sure, I cried, because you know, I felt like I didn’t belong in anyone’s circle, and that was it.”

But thanks to the technology of the 21st century, Loewenstern’s life-long quest to find her mother finally paid off in 2018.

It was Loewenstern’s daughter-in-law who suggested that she use Ancestry.com to try to find more about her mother, as The Post reports. Loewenstern, who had previously given up on the search, figured she didn’t have much to lose.

“I wanted to find out who (my mother) was before I went,” Loewenstern said.

And remarkably, Loewenstern finally found her mother after decades of searching.

It started with an email from Sam Ciminieri who said that Lillian Feinsilver was his mom. What makes this story even more incredible is that Feinsilver was just 80 miles away from Loewenstern in an assisted living facility in Port St. Lucie, Florida.

“As it turns out, we have a whole other family we never would have discovered,” Ciminieri told The Post.

According to the paper, Feinsilver was 100 years old when Loewenstern finally found her. She also had dementia and used a wheelchair, which meant that Ciminieri’s ex-wife, Shelley, was still caring for her. Although she was losing her memory, Shelley told The Post that her mother-in-law had repeatedly asked for her daughter. “She kept saying she lost her daughter, she lost her daughter,” Shelley said.

But what happened to Feinsilver, and why was she separated from her own daughter? One theory is that healthcare workers took the baby away from Feinsilver, who gave birth as a young, single mother. 

“Both of them went through life thinking the other had died,” Shelley told The Post.

Once the two families had discovered each other, they decided to set up a meeting at Feinsilver’s assisted living facility. And although it took some time for Feinsilver to fully grasp what was happening, she eventually said, “This is my daughter.”

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What do you think of this incredible story of a daughter’s quest to find her long-lost mother? Have you ever experienced something similar? Let us know — and be sure to pass this story on.