Mother And Son Reunited After 71 Years: 'Like A Wonderful Cake'

RINGGOLD, GA — Nobody, not even her husband of 51 years, had known Jean Stapp had given birth to a child at age 16: 71 years ago this month.

It’s something only Stapp knew, and something she could never stop thinking about. She told WRCB in Chattanooga, Tennessee, that she stayed up countless nights after placing the baby up for adoption in hopes of one day holding her son, Patrick Sherman.

That day has finally come.

Stapp, now 88, and Sherman, 71, met at long last recently in Ringgold, Georgia, where Stapp lives, WRCB reported. A mother-son reunion after 71 years, the two felt instantly connected, according to the news report.

“They wouldn’t let me see him, they wouldn’t let me hold him as soon as he was born,” Stapp told the news station.

The two found each other through an Ancestry.com genealogy test, which Sherman’s daughter had bought him a subscription to as a birthday gift. The mom and son would talk over the phone, and hugged it out after crossing paths for the first time in more than seven decades.

Sherman told WRCB his heart was beating hard from the excitement he had on the plane ride from near his home in Washington state to Chattanooga. His mom had talked with him over the phone about when she would get to hug him.

He had long felt that a piece of his heart was missing. That piece now found, Sherman told WRCB it’s "like a wonderful cake,” as finally meeting his biological mother “lights up every taste bud you have.”