An adopted woman who spent eight years searching for her birth parents discovered that she had been friends with her birth father on Facebook for three years.

Georgian journalist Tamuna Museridze had set up a Facebook page to find her own birth family, but also to help reunite other adopted children with their families.

Her search led to her uncovering a massive baby trafficking scandal in Georgia that had impacted the lives of thousands of people.

For more than three decades, large numbers of parents were told that their babies had died at birth, when in reality they were being trafficked on the black market.

Tamuna’s Facebook group helped reunite several families, but she struggled to find one of her own.

The 40-year-old grew up not knowing she was adopted, but when her mother died in 2016, she cleaned out her house and found a birth certificate with Tamuna’s name but a different birth date.

She suspected she might have been adopted and began an eight-year search, the BBC reports.

Finally, this summer she received a message on Facebook from a person who said she knew a woman who hid a pregnancy and gave birth in September 1984, around the time Tamuna was born.

However, when she tried to contact her birth mother, the woman screamed and told Tamuna that she had never had a child before.

She then posted a call on Facebook asking if anyone knew her mother.

A woman responded and said it was her aunt who hid the pregnancy and agreed to a DNA test.

When the test arrived, it confirmed that Tamuna and the woman on Facebook were cousins, meaning the woman who had called Tamuna was actually her mother.

She asked her mother for her father’s name, which turned out to be a man named Gurgen Korava.

Tamuna started searching for her father on Facebook. To her surprise, Gurgen was already her boyfriend and had been following her story for three years to find her father.

Tamuna then arranged to meet him and traveled 160 miles to his hometown of Zugdidi.

She said the moment her father looked at her, he knew she was his daughter.

They met and discovered they had many similar interests, Gurgen was a renowned dancer and Tamuna’s daughters both love dancing.

He said he had a brief relationship with her birth mother but did not know she had become pregnant.

Since then, Tamuna has met a whole new family, including half-siblings, aunts and uncles.

Thanks to a police television station that organized a private meeting, she finally had the opportunity to meet her birth mother.

She learned from her mother that, unlike the hundreds of people she helped reunite, she was not a victim of the baby trafficking scandal.

After a brief encounter with Gurgen and overwhelmed with shame, her mother decided to hide her pregnancy.

She traveled to Tbilisi under the guise of an operation, gave birth to Tamuna and remained in the city until the adoption was arranged.

Tamuna said: “It was painful to learn that I spent ten days alone with her before the adoption. ‘I try not to think about it.’

She said her mother asked her to lie and tell the world that she too was stolen and that they were both victims of the human trafficking scandal.

However, Tamuna told her it would be unfair to all the parents whose babies were stolen.

Her mother asked her to leave and the couple stopped speaking to each other.

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