Denise McCarty of Springfield, Vermont, spent 44 years believing her birth family didn’t want her.
Adopted from a South Korean orphanage, she was raised by a family in the U.S.
Growing up, she thought she had been abandoned at a hospital because that’s what the adoption agency told her. Little did she know that thousands of miles away, her parents were desperately searching for her.
Denise (born Sang-Ae) had no idea that she also had biological siblings.
In 1976, she and Sang-Hee, her twin sister, disappeared from a market while they were shopping with their grandmother. They were just 3 years old. While their parents brought Sang-Hee home a few days later, they found no trace of Denise. She ended up at an orphanage, where she was adopted.
While she was growing up in the U.S., her family went to great lengths to find her. They even opened a business in the same market in case she returned. But decades passed without a whisper of their daughter… until this year!
Thanks to a DNA test after a trip to South Korea, she and her family were united.
After more than four decades, Denise was reunited with her brother, sister, and mother in an emotional video call. Unfortunately, her grandmother and father have passed away, but she believes they were there with her in spirit.
In that call Sang Hee told Sang Ae — “We never abandoned you, Sang-Ae, We were looking for you every day.”