ONE WOMAN'S REMARKABLE DISCOVERY ' I Was Switched at Birth'

ADOPTED AS AN INFANT, DIANE BAZELLA LOCATED THE MOTHER ON HER BIRTH CERTIFICATE, BUT THEIR DNA DIDN'T MATCH. HOW SHE LEARNED THE SHOCKING TRUTH

- JOHNNY DODD

For as long as she can remember, Diane Bazella has been consumed by the dream of spending her birthday with the woman who gave birth to her and placed her for adoption. "I was always thinking about her, wondering what she looked like and if maybe I had just walked past her and never even knew it," recalls Bazella. "And my birthday was the one day out of the year that I knew for sure that we were both thinking about each other."

The long-held dream came true one afternoon last September when Bazella turned 63 and miraculously celebrated her birthday alongside birth mom Sherri Geerts, 81, with a long lunch and shopping in Bazella's hometown of Minnetonka, Minn. "I just always had this knowing that the two of us would meet," says Bazella. "I always knew this day would happen." 

What Bazella never imagined was how long it would take and how complex the journey would be. "If it hadn't happened to me, I probably wouldn't believe it." Her search began at age 5 when her parents, Walter and Ila Peterson, told her she had been adopted. From that moment on, she asked questions and searched in what would become a decades-long genealogical goose chase. And by the time she found her way to Geerts, Bazella had spent nearly 40 years convinced that two people she tracked down in the 1980s—including the woman whose name was on her birth certificate—were her biological parents. But it was in 2021, after questions about the results of a DNA test had led to years of amateur detective work, that Bazella not only located her birth mother but also unearthed a shocking revelation: She and another infant had been switched shortly after their births at a hospital for unwed mothers in 1960. “I feel like I’m finally home,” says Bazella, still ecstatic to have learned the truth. “I have that bond I was searching for.”