A woman given up for adoption as a baby was able to reconnect with her birth mum 7,000 miles away thanks to Facebook.
Katherine Samwell-Smith, 45, was born in Chile but came to the UK to be adopted at six months old.
Now she lives in High Barnet, north London, with her husband Michael Gehr, 49, and their children Benji, nine, and Sophie, six.
When her adoptive mother died in 2010 and she became a mum herself, Katherine yearned to find the woman who had handed her over to an orphanage in Santiago.
Knowing only her mum's name, she joined a Facebook group in 2019 which reconnects adoptees from Chile with their birth families.
One morning two years later, Katherine received a message from one of the administrators to say "we have found your b-mother."
“Immediately my heart started racing," she said.
"It transpired that a local police officer who was helping the group had found my mother Ximena and knocked on her door, asking if she was my mum. She confirmed that she was.
"I was stunned, she could have easily denied it and shut the door, but my birth mother agreed to talk to me. Finally, the pieces were falling into place."
Katherine said she merely hoped for somebody to point her in the right direction when she joined the Facebook group.
But administrators managed to find her birth mum by creating a list of women in Chile who had the same name and contacting each of them.
Thanks to their hard work, Katherine was reunited with Ximena, 68, on FaceTime after being apart for 44 years.
Katherine said: “When I set out to find Ximena I knew it was a near-impossible task.
"I had very little to go on and I didn’t know where to begin. The Facebook group had connections with Chile which was pivotal in finding her.
“And I am so glad they did, as I feel like I finally know who I am and I’m hoping I can meet her in person in the next year.”
Growing up, the subject of Katherine's adoption had been spoken about openly in her household since she was three or four years old.
She said: "I remember being very proud of the fact that I was adopted and at around five years old, I told everyone at school.
"It made me feel special and I was completely obsessed with the Chilean culture. I loved the fact that I was 100 per cent Chilean.”
Katherine recalls focussing her school assignments and projects on Chile.
She said: “I knew a lot of facts about the country earlier on, simply because I was always doing my school projects on Chile."
Back in 1977, Katherine’s parents Paul and Rosie had found the orphanage in Santiago knowing they wanted to adopt and chose her from a selection of photos.
At six months old, Katherine was flown across the world to Gatwick Airport just outside London, where they met.
She said: “It was chance that I was fortunate enough to be the baby they picked and I do often wonder about what happened to the other babies in my orphanage.
"My birth mother was only 23 and she hadn’t been able to keep me.”
Katherine said she had a very happy childhood and that her mum and dad, now 78, told her anything she asked about joining the family.
But at the age of 17, she began wanting to know more about Chile and took an emotional trip to her orphanage with her mum.
She said: "At the time, I wasn’t too interested in finding my birth family but I asked about my records and the orphanage told me that they had got rid of them after I turned 16.”
Katherine spent a month in Chile and returned two years later to work as a teacher for six months feeling "reconnected."
Returning to the UK, Katherine started a family of her own with her husband Michael and started to consider looking for her birth family in 2019.
She said: “My adoptive mum had sadly passed away in 2010, which was devastating. A thought crossed my mind at the time as to whether my birth mother was still alive.
"I was missing my adoptive mum terribly and I wanted my birth mother to be in my life. It was like a piece in the puzzle of my life was missing.
When her mum passed away, Katherine was given her adoption records and started feeling a pull to find out where she came from.
Finding the Facebook group Chile Adoption Birth Family Search finally gave her the breakthrough she needed and she set up a FaceTime call with Ximena in August 2021.
“My husband had to convince me to dial the number as I was so nervous," she said. Seeing her face on the screen was unbelievable.
“She struggles with English and I’m no longer fluent in Spanish, so our phone calls are a lot of waving and smiling and I use Google Translate to talk to her.”
She continued: “I learned that I have a half brother who is 18 months older than me and was raised by our grandparents. After me, my mother never had any more children and she never married.
“The tough questions still haven’t been asked because it’s not a conversation I want to have with her over the phone.
"For me, finding my birth mother has helped my life come full circle. No matter what happens now, I know who I am.”
