Woman Switched at Birth Celebrates Birthday with Biological Mom After Decades-Long Search (Exclusive)

For as long as she can remember, Diane Bazella has dreamed of spending her birthday with the woman who gave birth to her and gave her up for adoption.

“I kept thinking about her, wondering what she looked like and whether I might have just walked past her without even knowing it,” Bazella recalls. “And my birthday was the only day of the year that I knew for sure that we both thought of each other.”

A longtime dream came true one afternoon last September, when Bazella turned 63 and celebrated her birthday with her biological mother, Sherri Geerts, 81, with a long lunch and shopping spree in Bazella’s hometown of Minnetonka, Minn. “I always had that knowing that the two of us would meet,” says Bazella. “I always knew this day would happen.”

What Bazella could not have imagined was how long it would take and how complex the journey would be. “If it hadn’t happened to me, I probably wouldn’t have believed it.” Her search began at the age of 5 when her parents Walter and Ila Peterson told her she was adopted. From that moment on, she asked questions and searched in what would become a decades-long genealogy chase.

And while she found her way to Geerts, Bazella spent nearly 40 years convinced that the two people she found in the 1980s — including the woman whose name was on her birth certificate — were her biological parents. But it wasn’t until 2021, after questions about DNA test results led to years of amateur detective work, that Bazella not only located her birth mother, but made a shocking discovery: she and another child had been switched shortly after birth at the hospital for unmarried mothers in 1960.

“I feel like I’m finally home,” says Bazella, still overjoyed to learn the truth. “I have that connection I’ve been looking for.”

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Diane Bazella at 9 months.

Courtesy of Diane Bazella

Raised in Edina, Minn., Bazella says her loving parents’ decision to tell their little girl how she came into their lives at 9 months old changed the trajectory of her life. “I felt different from that day,” she says.

In an age before the internet and home DNA tests, Bazella was 23 in 1983 when she finally found what she believed to be her original birth certificate and found two people she assumed were her biological parents. “It was amazing,” says Bazella. “I felt like this journey I’ve been on since I was little was finally over.”

She learned she was adopted in 1961, a few months after her biological mother, then 18, gave birth at Booth Memorial Hospital in St. Louis. Paul, Minn. other marriages, they warmly welcomed her into their lives.

For more on Bazella’s journey, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday, or subscribe here.

“One of the first things my mom said to me was, ‘I called you Kelly Jean,'” Bazella recalls. Although she was always puzzled by her lack of resemblance to any of them, “for the next 39 years I thought my name was Kelly Jean. I even named my daughter Kelly.”

When the woman she believed to be her birth mother died of cancer in 2000, Bazella was heartbroken but grateful for the time they had spent together. Still, she couldn’t stop wondering why he didn’t feel a deeper connection with her.

In 2017, hoping to learn more about genealogy and curious if her biological father might have had other children, she purchased a home DNA test kit. The results were a surprise: none of the names on her genealogy report matched any of her known relatives.

Adoptive parents Walter and Ila Peterson (with her) were loving and open about her adoption. “I’ve been on this mission since I was five years old,” Bazella says.

Courtesy of Diane Bazella

By 2021, Bazella — who had spent four years reaching out to people on the test report, unsuccessfully trying to figure out how they might be related — decided to circle back to one of the women listed as a close DNA match. “When I emailed her,” says Bazella, “she wasn’t sure if I was some kind of scammer, and she wasn’t comfortable sharing her personal life with a stranger.”

Bazella apologized for contacting her again, but explained that she had an unwavering hunch that the two had the same biological father. The woman was stunned, but emailed her a few hours later to let her know that she had just confronted her father with Bazella’s theory—and that her hunch was correct. The woman’s father admitted that he fathered another girl in 1960 with a woman who was no longer in his life named Sherri Nordlie.

Bazella was taken aback for a moment. “My mom’s name isn’t Sherri,” she remembers thinking. “Then I suddenly realized that everything I had believed in all those years was wrong.” The woman and man she knew as her biological mother and father were not actually her biological parents. But how could that be? Bazella had another premonition: “At birth I was mistaken for another baby in the hospital.”

In the days that followed, the remaining pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Bazella called the other woman who appeared on her DNA report, whom she had befriended. When she explained that she had recently learned that her biological father had another child with a woman then named Sherri Nordlie, the woman said, “That’s my cousin!” And that relative, as a subsequent DNA test confirmed, was Bazella’s real biological mother, Sherri Geerts.

Diane Bazella with her biological mother Sherri Geerts.

Caroline Yang

Since Geerts first called Basella on Christmas Day 2021 — not long after Geerts’ husband of 62 years died — the long-separated mother and daughter have remained in constant contact. They email each other once a day (“I write to her every morning,” says Bazella, “and she writes to me every night”), and rarely talk on the phone for less than five hours at a time.

Every few months, Bazella flies to visit her birth mother at her home in Sunnyvale, Calif., or Geerts flies to visit her. “We’re definitely making up for lost time,” says Geerts, who has three grown sons. “I never lost hope that one day I would find her.”

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Bazella has also formed a bond with her biological father – 83-year-old Victor Rebeck – who calls his daughter from his home in San Clemente, California, at least once a week. “This was a life-changing experience for me,” he says. “It was a godsend.”

Since finding out, Bazella has met the biological parents she’s been searching for her whole life, along with her four half-siblings. But there were also bittersweet moments. “I had to call the woman I thought was my sister all those years and tell her, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not really your sister.’ We were both in shock for months.” (The two are still in touch.)

Bazella also hopes to one day find the woman she was swapped with shortly after they were born two and a half hours apart on September 29, 1960.

“If she had ever looked for her birth mother, she would have found my real birth mother,” Bazella says. “But since she never asked for it, we don’t know who she is.”

But for now, Bazella says, she is the happiest woman alive. “I still grieve for all the years I didn’t spend with them,” Bazella says. “But I feel like I hit the jackpot to finally have them in my life.”

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Source: HIS Education