Toledo newspaper helps reunite mother, daughter

September 17, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

TOLEDO

A Tennessee woman and her birth mother have been reunited after 39 years thanks to a conversation among employees at an Ohio newspaper where the daughter placed an ad searching for her mother.

Abigail Flores Hall, 39, of Cookeville, Tenn., recently called the classified advertising department of The Blade in Toledo to place the ad with information about her birth mother, the newspaper reported.

Flores Hall had searched for a decade and found little information. She knew her mother’s age, her grandparents’ occupations and that her mother’s siblings included two sets of twins and a partially deaf boy.

Ad saleswoman Connie Cross cautioned Flores Hall not to get her hopes up but mentioned the story to a co-worker who thought the information sounded like the family of her aunt and uncle. The co-worker checked with her family and found that a cousin had been given up for adoption.

Hall and her birth mother, Maria Martinez, 55, were soon talking on the phone and met Wednesday in a tearful reunion at a relative’s Toledo home.

“It was just so overwhelming,” said Flores Hall, who grew up about 50 miles southwest of Toledo in Defiance.

Martinez said she had prayed that her daughter was safe and happy.

“I love her,” said Martinez, who had known only that her child was a girl before the baby was whisked away at a Toledo hospital and given to adoptive parents.