Imagine meeting your sisters for the first time…50 years later. That sounds like something out of those corny Lifetime movies, right? Well, it happened, and it’s real life for 67-year-old Abbie Greene, 54-year-old Tammy Makram, and 50-year-old Liz Kellner.
So, what exactly happened? Well, Abbie Greene was placed for adoption the day she was born in 1948. When she was 17, she read a story about a baby girl found in a cardboard box on the day before New Year’s Eve in 1965. The infant had been left in the laundry room of an apartment building that was near Greene’s home in Minneapolis. For whatever reason, the story enthralled her.
It wasn’t until 2014, however, that she found out that infant was actually her sister. She discovered this when she submitted her DNA to 23andMe. This is when she found out she and Liz Kellner, who lived in Illinois, were sisters. Only a year later, both sisters found out they had another sister after submitting DNA to Ancestry.com. In August 2015, Greene matched with Tammy Makram, who shares a biological mother with both women.
What’s even more eerie is the fact that Kellner discovered Makram’s Facebook post in which she revealed she was discovered in a cardboard box at St. Paul, Minnesota’s Miller Hospital as an infant on Christmas Eve in 1961. Kellner couldn’t believe, stating in PEOPLE:
“I read her story and her words were mine.”
This past October, the three sisters finally united for the first in in a family reunion in Minneapolis. While the three women were brought up in loving families, they also all felt the same need to discovered the hidden parts of their past. Makram stated:
“You see parts of yourself in each of the siblings. Getting to know them has helped me understand why I am the way I am.
Meeting Liz was the first time that anyone could understand where I was coming from. After all that time I spent thinking I would never find anyone, to find not just someone who has the same beginnings as me, but a full sister is really amazing.”
Besides meeting each other, the sister were also able to track down their now 87-year-old mother, although their mother now suffers from dementia. Coupled with the fact that she and her husband have been, and still are, reluctant and unable to talk about the past, their births remain unclear.
Despite this, however, the three women not only accept the past and its secrets, but focus on the positives, Kellner explained:
“She gave us up, which was the right thing to do. We understand that there is a negative side to this story, but we all choose what we make of things, and the fact that we managed to find each other–and that we now have the chance to make up for 50 years apart–is just amazing.”
Focusing on the positives, rather than the negatives, is the only thing we can do.
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