“I don’t know how to tell you this, Bethany, but I’m your birth mom,” said Shelly Jimenez Domingo-Crowe on Monday night. That call came just three days after 29-year-old Bethany Conrad made a Facebook search post to find her. She has since learned that she has two brothers and two sisters.
The pair may choose to take a DNA test for confirmation at some point, but both are confident about the match. Bethany said Shelly shared with her information that was not known to the public. “I’m so overwhelmed with joy. I’m so excited. I have siblings I didn’t know about. I’m so stoked,” she says.
Bethany says she is usually a private person, and she doesn’t have many friends on Facebook. She’s surprised at the number of shares her post received in such a short time. Her family is thankful to all who took the time to share. “It almost doesn’t seem real. It feels like a dream because I have wanted this for a while. But I know it is. I’m so blessed,” she says.
An upcoming move out of state to South Carolina sparked an urgency for her search. She felt like she would lose her chance to find her birth mother if she was no longer in the area. Bethany was born in Oswego and raised in Cortland. Her birth mother was in her early teens when she was forced to relinquish her into foster care. Bethany had a cleft lip and palate at birth. Her adoptive mom sent photos of her to Shelly after the corrective surgery.
Conrad was always curious about where she came from. She said, “I feel like I could have been walking in the grocery store, or a park, or the New York State Fair, and she could have walked right by me.” In just three days her post was shared over 31,000 times.
