Dear God, please let me find my dad,” Deanna Shrodes prayed at least twice every day.
The 56-year-old Tampa, Florida, pastor had always known she was adopted. And while she grew up in a good home with loving parents, a baby sister and cherished grandmother, she couldn’t help wondering about her birth parents.
Her adoption papers provided some information: Her birth name had been Melanie Lynn, she was of Greek descent and the last names of her birth mom and dad were Alley and Nicholas, respectively.
Over the years, Deanna had scoured phone books and newspapers, searching for those names and making countless phone calls leading nowhere. Then, when she was 27 and pregnant with the first of her three children, she found her maternal grandfather from a Social Security death registry and was able to track down her birth mother.
Deanna reached out, and after a rocky start, they forged a relationship. But other than once commenting, “You look so much like him,” her birth mother never wanted to talk about Deanna’s father. She passed away in 2013, having never even revealed his name.
Still, Deanna couldn’t give up hope of finding him.
“There’s a hole in my heart that I need to fill,” Deanna told her husband, Larry, who is also a pastor.
Holding on to hope
More determined than ever, Deanna registered with every possible family tree and DNA service. She gathered friends, genealogists and others on a private Facebook group to help her search. But after years of looking, no luck.
Until last May, when an alert popped up on Deanna’s 23andMe account. You have a match!
Could this be it? she gasped, her heart pounding. The match turned out to be a cousin. His mother’s
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