Baby trafficking fighter discovers father among Facebook friends

Museridze's search began in 2016 when the mother who raised her passed away. While clearing out her house, Museridze found her birth certificate with a false birth date.

By ELLIE ESQUENAZI DECEMBER 4, 2024 09:26 Updated: DECEMBER 4, 2024 09:40

Tamuna Museridze with her father Gurgen Khorava. (photo credit: Screenshot/Instagram)

Tamuna Museridze, a Georgian woman, discovered that her biological father was her Facebook friend while searching for her birth parents, BBC reported on Sunday.

Museridze's search began in 2016 when the mother who raised her passed away. While clearing out her house, Museridze found her birth certificate with a false birth date. She started to suspect she might be adopted.

In hopes of finding her birth parents, she set up a Facebook group called Vedzeb, or I'm Searching. Rather than finding her family, she uncovered a Georgian baby trafficking ring. Over several decades, parents had been lied to that their babies had died when, in fact, the children were sold.

Museridze, a journalist and Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University graduate, has worked to reunite hundreds of families affected by baby trafficking. Despite all her contributions, she was unable - until now - to find her biological parents. She wondered if she, too, had been stolen as a child, according to the BBC.

Museridze told BBC, "I was a journalist on this story, but it was a personal mission for me as well."

Her initial breakthrough occurred this summer when she was sent a Facebook message that someone knew a woman who had concealed a birth in September of 1984. The woman was from the same town as Museridze.

A baby being cleaned up and assessed by the paediatrician after he was born. (credit: Inez Carter. Via Shutterstock)

Suspecting that the mentioned woman might be her birth mother, Museridze searched for her online. She took her post down upon request from the woman's niece but was promised a DNA test to determine any blood relation. According to the BBC, after a week of waiting, the DNA results confirmed the woman to be Museridze's biological mother.

With half of an answer to who her biological parents were, Museridze called her mother on the phone, and despite getting her biological father's name, the conversation did not go as she expected. "She started screaming, shouting - she said she hadn't given birth to a child. She didn't want anything to do with me," the BBC cited Museridze. "I was ready for anything, but her reaction was beyond anything I could imagine."

Connecting with her father

Once she found her father's name was Gurgen Khorava, she searched for him on Facebook. It turned out that Gurgen had been following her social media all along, as she is known widely across Georgia for her work with family reconnection.

She was astounded to discover that he'd "been on my friend list for three years… He didn't even know my birth mother had been pregnant. It was a huge surprise for him."

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They arranged to meet in his western Georgia hometown of Zugdidi soon after getting in contact. 

As she approached their meeting, she was in shock, but walking up to Gurgen's gate, she felt surprisingly relaxed.

"It was strange. The moment he looked at me, he knew that I was his daughter," she said. Upon meeting, she and her 72-year-old father hugged and smiled at one another for a moment. They went inside and "just sat together, watching each other and trying to find something in common."

Upon chatting more, she realized they had many shared interests, including dance. Gurgen had once been a successful dancer at the State Ballet of Georgia, while Museridze's daughters, Gurgen's newfound granddaughters, also have a passion for dance.

Gurgen introduced Museridze to new relatives, including half-siblings, cousins, and uncles. They were all in agreement that she had a strong resemblance to them. "Out of all his children, I look the most like my father," she told BBC.

Although she had now been happily reunited with her father, she still had a looming question: had she been stolen at birth and sold, like so many other Georgians had?

When a Polish TV network approached Museridze about a documentary filming in October, she was at last able to meet her birth mother in private.

Unlike the many families that Museridze had helped connect, she found out that she had not been stolen at birth but rather that her mother had given her up and kept it secret for over 40 years.

Museridze reflected that her mother asked her to lie and tell the public that she had been stolen. "She told me that if I would not say that I was stolen, everything would end between us." Museridze refused, and they have not spoken since.

She felt this falsity would be unfair to parents of stolen babies. "If I lie, nobody's going to believe those mothers anymore. Would I do it all again? Of course I would; I found out so much about my new family."