A 21-year-old woman has used the powers of social media to find her biological parents through Facebook.
Having known for most of her life that she was adopted, Jenessa Simons from Utah recently decided to use the social networking website to help her find her apparent biological parents.
Simons told Utah news station KSL: “Everyone on Facebook’s been posting posters like, ‘One million likes and I get a puppy’, and I thought, ‘Hey, these are getting shared around. I’ve seen kids get likes and get a puppy, so I should probably give it a shot’.”
Simons’ Facebook photo of her holding a notice describing herself and what she knew of her parents was liked by more than 15,000 people and shared more than 160,000 times.
Just a couple of days later, she found her birth mother.
“She was just very surprised,” said Simons. “It was kind of intermittent messaging each other, but she said she told her extended family, and they were all completely ecstatic that I had gotten hold of her.”
Soon afterwards, Simons’s biological father contacted her. She recalled: “He sounded really surprised, but happy.”
Simons’s birth parents, who are no longer together, gave her up for adoption at the time because they were 16 years old when they had her.
