Facebook can bring people together and tear
people apart.
Angela Palmer has spent most of her life
believing that her own mother abandoned her
as a baby. Now, at 44, she’s learned the truth
and has spoken with her mom for the first time in decades. And while Palmer is thrilled,
her quest isn’t over yet. Now she has to raise funds
to bring the mother she never knew
from Croatia to the United States.
Palmer, a medical health project services
coordinator, is seeking the money through the website Fundly, where, as of Tuesday, she
had raised more than $1,200 of the $4,000
she needs for two round-trip plane tickets for
her mother and her husband.
The new beginning was triggered by, of all
things, a Facebook friend request. “I was at work the week before Thanksgiving, when I
received a friend request from a woman
named Helga Simeckie in Croatia,” Palmer,
from Oceanside, California, tells Yahoo Shine. “I
didn’t think much of it because I get random
requests all the time, until she sent me a message written in German asking when I
was born.” Palmer, who was born and raised
in Germany, speaks the language fluently and
wrote back, asking who the woman was. “She said
she was my mother.
I was shocked because my mother had abandoned me when I was a baby,” says Palmer. She had been
raised by her father, who had always told her that
after her mother gained custody following their
divorce, she dropped the young girl off at a German
orphanage when she was less than a year old.
“Later, my father took me in, and although he was an alcoholic and mentally and physically abusive,
he was the only parent I knew,” Palmer says. But
Simeckie tells a different story.
After emailing Palmer the evidence she had — her
birth certificate and old family photos — she told
Palmer that she hadn’t actually abandoned her and that Palmer’s father
actually kidnapped her. “She said my father was
wanted in Germany for kidnapping and
domestic violence, but he avoided the police
by constantly moving us to new cities,” she
says. It all began to make sense to Palmer, whose father had said he was a traveling salesman and
had to keep moving their small family in order to
find work. In fact, they moved 12 times before
Palmer turned 18.
“Apparently, my paternal grandfather had kept my
mother informed of my whereabouts during the years she was in contact with my father, but each
time he received a court summons, we moved
again,” she says. “I still don’t understand how he
managed to escape the law so many times.” In late
November, the mother-daughter duo spoke for the
first time over Skype with the help of local news affiliate San Diego6 and have emailed each other
every day since then.
“I have an amazing gift that I didn’t have last
year and I hope that my story will encourage
others to keep looking for lost family
members,” says Palmer. “My story could happen to anyone.”