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Woman discovers her co-worker is her birth mom
By Andrea Morabito March 3, 2016 | 5:15am


Jenny Thomas reunited with her birth mother, Nita Valdez, thanks to a new TV show, "Long Lost Family," which premieres Sunday on TLC.

Jenny Thomas has known she was adopted since the age of 4. With very little information known about her birth mother (besides that she was from Rochester, NY, where Thomas, 40, still lives), she would find herself peering into women’s faces, wondering if any could be her mom.

After spending more than 15 years intermittently trying to track her down on the Internet, it wasn’t until Thomas signed up for the new TLC reality show “Long Lost Family” that she learned the truth: She had not only seen her birth mother before, but worked alongside her for two years.


Nita Valdez

“I was just in shock,” Thomas tells The Post of first seeing her mother’s photograph. “I had looked in so many faces for so many years, [thinking] ‘Could that be her? Is she looking at me because she knows me?’ All the while I had looked at the woman who once knew me as her daughter.

“I didn’t expect that, not in a million years.”

The two women met 10 years ago, when Thomas was working as a part-time patient care technician at a Rochester hospital, and her mother, Nita Valdez, was a patient transporter. They interacted on a regular basis to move patients from their rooms to rehabilitation therapy, and while Thomas says they worked well together, she never noticed a physical or emotional connection.

“She’s very quiet, funny. I’m comical, so she would always laugh at my jokes, so that was a plus,” Thomas says. “We never went past a working-professional relationship at all.”

Thomas’s tale is one of 16 stories featured in “Long Lost Family” (premiering Sunday at 10 p.m. on TLC), which seeks to reunite people searching for their biological relatives — such as foster children looking for birth mothers, parents looking for a child they placed for adoption, or a woman seeking her biological father after learning the dad who raised her isn’t a blood relative. Two hosts — themselves adoptees — then use public records and DNA testing to try to track down the missing family members for an on-camera reunion.

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Adopted Woman Searches 15 Years for Birth Mom, Only to Discover They're Coworkers

Woman's Day
Marlisse Cepeda
Woman's Day
March 4, 2016

Jenny Thomas, of Rochester, NY, has known she was adopted for the past 36 years. Thomas, 40, has been intently searching for her mother for 15 of those years, but never managed to find her.

All she knew was that her mom lived in the same town as she did. When she read about the TLC show Long Lost Family, Thomas decided to apply. The new show reunites foster and adopted children with their biological parents. They use DNA testing and public records to reunite the relatives, and then catch the reunion on camera.

As seen in the preview clip below of the show's first season, the show's hosts hand Thomas a photo of her birth mom, Nita Valdez, and her jaw immediately drops. "Oh my God, I know her."

It turns out Thomas and her mother worked together at a Rochester hospital for two years, and neither of them had any idea of their powerful connection. Thomas was a patient care technician and Valdez was a patient transporter, so they both interacted frequently when patients had to be taken to rehab therapy.

"She's very quiet, funny. I'm comical, so she would always laugh at my jokes, so that was a plus. We never went past a working-professional relationship at all," Thomas told the NY Post.

Long Lost Family will air their full, incredible story on Sunday, March 6 on TLC.