After 8 heartbreaking years of searching, a simple Facebook photo helped Kelly Baumgartner get in contact with her birth mother in just 44 days. (Photo: Kelley Baumgartner/Facebook)

“It was a fluke,” 28-year-old Kelley Baumgartner tells Yahoo Parenting of getting into contact with the birth mother she had been searching for since she was a teenager. The pair made contact on March 16, just 44 days after Baumgartner posted a photo of herself detailing the search on Facebook. “A friend of mine told me about someone she knew who made a sign and posted it and I thought, ‘What the heck, I’m just going to do it.’”

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Today she’s happy to report that, “I’m ecstatic! Finding her is something that I’ve always wanted in my life.”

Before that Facebook post though, the Jacksonville, Fla. stay-at-home, married mother-of-three had exhausted the search for her biological mother, unknown to her, other than the fact that the woman who gave her up in South Bend, Indiana in 1987 was a hairdresser in her 20s with seven siblings.

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With the support of her adoptive parents Becky and Sam Huston, Baumgartner started looking for her birth mom as soon as she was legally able. “I always wanted to know about her,” says Baumgartner, who moved with her family including brother Kevin, also adopted, to Jacksonville when she was 3. “I felt it desperately when I turned 13 but I had to be 21 to legally search.” And even then she hit a dead end.

An old family photo of the Hustons. (Photo: Kelley Baumgartner).

Indiana law, reports the Elkhart Truth, doesn’t entitle adoptees to access birth certificates or identifying information in closed adoptions, such as Baumgartner’s.

“I hired a company to help me back in 2006,” she says. “I paid $4,000 up front and two years later they sent me letter that they just couldn’t find anything. I was crushed. It took me months to move on. I thought if a company like this couldn’t find her, what could I do?”

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Baumgartner says she had just one sheet of paper with information about the woman who’d given her up for adoption via Catholic Social Services. “Every year I’d look at it and think there might be something I missed seeing before that could help me find her,” she says. And every time she changed address, she made sure to update her contact information with the Indiana Adoption Registry “hoping that if my birth mother ever registered they would call me.”

So when a friend suggested she try social media, Baumgartner decided to go for it. “I remember thinking, ‘this is the last time I can put myself through this,’ so I gave it my all.” She took the Facebook photo and posted it on Jan. 31, made a video on YouTube, and dedicated a Twitter and email address to her search.

Still, she says, “I had to stay realistic” about the chances that nothing would come of all her effort. But the Facebook photo went viral with more than 200,000 shares — one of them eventually reaching the former hairdresser from Indiana who’d given birth to Baumgartner nearly three decades ago.

Sitting in traffic on her way home from the grocery store on March 16, Baumgartner got the email that has turned her life “upside down,” she says. “I saw the first sentence and I had to pull over. I felt like I was going to pass out. It said, ‘I’m 99.9 percent sure I’m your birth mother,’ and that’s all that I needed to know.”

Through her social media search Baumgartner says she’s been inundated with emails and messages but insists, “When I read this, something just came over me. It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced.” She just knew the search was finally over.

Shaking, she called her mom and dad. “When Kelley told me … I started crying,” Becky told the Elkhart Truth. “Both of us just said it didn’t seem real. If it was April 1, it would have been the worst joke we could have pulled. You go through so many emotions in five minutes — just a release of feelings to sitting back and going, ‘We did it.’”

Sam Huston, Kelly Baumgartner, and Becky Huston (Photo: Kelly Baumgartner).

Ever since that day, Baumgartner says she and her birth mother talk or text almost daily. “It’s like meeting someone you’ve known your whole life,” she says. “I feel so connected. It’s more than I could ever ask for, to be completely honest. I knew finding her could go any which way. The adoption journey sadly isn’t always pretty and I got the best way.”

The two are planning to meet up in person for the first time on Mother’s Day in Florida. “She’s flying in with my family,” says Baumgartner. “I have family.”

And she plans to bring her birth mother a special gift at their holiday reunion. “I want to make her a scrap book,” she says. “I have wanted to do that since I was a teenager. I want to fill it with all my baby photos and pictures to show her what she did — to thank her,” Baumgartner explains. “My parents suffered years of infertility and I want to thank her for sacrificing her body for someone she wasn’t even going to keep. I need to tell her thank you and that I’m OK. I couldn’t have done any of this, my life, without her.”

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