“In the letter, his grandmother explained how she was never able to have children, and how ashamed she and her husband always felt (big Catholics, in early 20th-century Mexico). She always wanted to have a child, so they decided to take a very long trip through Europe, from which they would come back with a baby. This baby was my dad’s mom, who always looked a bit different from her family (as white as it can be, bluest eyes you’ve ever seen). They found her in an orphanage run by some nuns in the north of France and immediately fell in love with her. Adoption was a big taboo at the time, so no one ever knew about it. The story they told was that she had gotten pregnant during their trip and had given birth to the baby in Europe. They brought her back to Mexico and registered her as a newborn, even though she was already several years old.
My grandmother lived all her life thinking she was her parents’ biological daughter. At 45, through a letter, she found out that she was adopted, that she was actually older than what she always thought, and that she was actually French, not Mexican.
My dad had to tell her all of this through the phone, while trying to understand a birth certificate written in French. My grandma eventually ended up hiring a private investigator and finding her family in France, but that’s another story.”
—mexmon
Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/briangalindo/people-who-found-out-secrets-after-family-member-died
