KUALA LUMPUR: A woman who was searching for her biological parents discovered her father was already in her Facebook friend list.
Tamuna Museridze, a journalist in Georgia, found a birth certificate in 2016 with the wrong date and suspected she was adopted.
She created a Facebook group, Vedzeb, to search for her birth parents.
In the process, she uncovered a baby trafficking syndicate in Georgia involving thousands of people, reported BBC.
Her work reunited hundreds of families. However, the lingering doubts of her own origins continued to plague her.
"I was a journalist on this story, but it was a personal mission for me as well," she says.
In a fateful turn of events, she received a message on Facebook about a woman who had hidden a pregnancy and given birth in Tbilisi in September 1984.
She eventually found the niece of the woman, who agreed to a DNA test. It was then that they discovered they were biological cousins.
Armed with the information, she tracked down her birth mother. But when she found her, things didn't turn out as she imagined.
"She started screaming, shouting - she said she hadn't given birth to a child. She didn't want anything to do with me," Tamuna said, adding that she wasn't upset, merely surprised at the response.
However, her story took a more heartwarming turn when she managed to convince the woman to reveal the identity of her father.
It was a man called Gurgen Khorava. Searching for the man, she realised he was following her on Facebook, intrigued by her story, but not realising he was a part of it.
In fact, Khorava was not even aware he had another daughter.
He had only a brief encounter with Museridze's mother, and the two were never in a relationship.
However, Khorava greeted her warmly when she arrived at his house.
She said she felt strangely calm when she walked up to his garden gate.
"It was strange, the moment he looked at me, he knew that I was his daughter," she recalls. "I had so many mixed emotions."
"We just sat together, watching each other and trying to find something in common," she says.
They soon discovered they had a lot in common. Khorava was a renowned dancer at the State Ballet of Georgia, and Museridze's children had followed in his passion.
"It was painful to learn that I spent 10 days alone with her before the adoption. I try not to think about that," Museridze said of her mother.
However, she had answered a lingering question, revealing that Museridze had not been stolen, like many of the babies in her story.
She says her mother told her to lie and claim she had been stolen.
"She told me that if I would not say that I was stolen, everything would end between us… and I said that I couldn't do that."
She said her mother then asked her to leave the house, and they haven't spoken since.
However, she said she would go through the experience again, as she learned a great deal about her new family.