(CNN) Since she was just a little girl, Connie Moultroup has had the same Christmas wish every year: to meet her biological mother. This week -- after 69 long years -- she finally did, all thanks to a DNA ancestry kit.

Genevieve Purinton, now 88, gave birth to Moultroup in 1949 at a hospital in Indiana. When she asked the staff if she could see her baby, they informed her the child had not survived.

"Because she was an unwed mother, she was told that I had died. She continued with her life not knowing I was still alive," Moultroup told CNN. It was not an uncommon practice at the time, as author Ann Fessler documented in the book " The Girls Who Went Away ."

Moultroup was taken to an orphanage and later adopted by a couple from Santa Barbara, California. But her adoptive parents passed away a few years later, when she was just 5-years-old.

"Her adoptive mother died of cancer, and shortly after, her adoptive father was diagnosed with a heart condition," Bonnie Chase, Moultroup's daughter, told CNN.

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