Three half-siblings who were abandoned separately as hours-old babies have been reunited.
The siblings, now all adults, were brought together again after tracking each other down through online DNA databases and then filming an episode of ’20/20′ on ABC.
Janet Barnicoat, 35, was found in 1981 in Lawndale, California, wrapped in a towel, put into a paper bag, and placed next to a dumpster in an alleyway. She still had her umbilical cord attached.
She was found by a woman, and was eventually adopted into a family.
In 1985, another baby girl was found, also just hours old, this time in a blue jumpsuit, and abandoned at a market only miles from where Barnicoat had been abandoned.
A year later, a baby boy was left on a stranger’s doorstep just days before Christmas – he too still had his umbilical cord attached. Both babies were also adopted – they would grow up to be Julie Hutchison and Dean Hundorf.
All three were related, but none of them knew of the existence of each other. All of them also asked continual questions about their birth parents, and also how their mother could abandon them under such circumstances.
‘I got really mad and angry [at my birth mother], and I held onto that for quite a long time,’ Barnicoat told the news program. ‘How do you leave your child in a paper bag in an alleyway?
‘It felt like, you know, she tossed me away. You put me next to a dumpster. It was tearing me up inside. There was questions of, ‘Do I have siblings? Who are my parents? Why was I adopted? Why didn’t they want me?”
The three were thrilled to meet and a geneticist who was at the meeting said their connection was obvious and that they were ‘so much alike’
But there was another surprise in store for them.
A genetic genealogist who heard about the pair, CeCe Moore, and whose specialty is abandoned babies, decided to help them with their search for their biological mom.
She cross-referenced their DNA with other databases, 23andMe.com and FamilyTreeDNA.com, and found yet another match, who turned to be Julie Hutchison, 31, who grew up in California but now lived in Baltimore.
Hutchison was stunned to learn she had two siblings and desperate to know about them: ‘I just want to know, you know, like how was their life growing up adopted? Did they have the same thoughts, you know, as I did growing up, like, ‘Who was my mom? Who was my dad?’
When the three were reunited by the TV show in California, not only was there a physical resemblance between all of them, but they also shared similar personality traits, and had similar sounding laughs.
‘These three people were so much alike. They had the same sense of humor. They were cracking each other up,’ said Moore. ‘There is something about biological and genetic bonds that survives any sort of separation.’
The show also tracked down the sibling’s mother, but her identity won’t be revealed until the show airs on May 6.
