45 Years After This Little Girl Was Suddenly Adopted, A DNA Test Revealed What Had Really Happened

Denise McCarty joined her family on Christmas Eve in 1974, but that wasn’t the day she was born. The young girl was three years old at the time, and she was being adopted by an American family living thousands of miles away from her home country of South Korea. It was a happy ending for the orphan, and for years, she believed that her biological family had abandoned her. But the truth came to light after she took a DNA test, and her story was even more heart-wrenching than the history she thought was her own.

Upon hearing the first couple of details of McCarty’s life, it sounds like a tale similar to so many others. Between 1953 and 2020 South Korea has had more than 167,000 of its children adopted by families across the world. And for many years, McCarty too thought her story was a relatively unremarkable one.

In fact, the agency that oversaw McCarty’s adoption said that her birth family had left her at a hospital. They stated that the young girl had been sick, so her parents had abandoned her there. And she may have gone on believing this tale if she hadn’t dug into it herself.

But the wheels started turning after McCarty traveled halfway around the world to visit her birth country in 2016. While in South Korea, she signed up for a DNA test provided by the government as part of a nationwide program designed to reconnect adoptees and their biological parents. For years, though, she heard nothing back.

That all changed in October 2020, when McCarty got a phone call that would change her life. The South Korean government had matched her with her biological family. And their subsequent reconnection retold the story of why she had ended up as the adopted child of an American family. It was a tale far removed from the one she had expected to hear.

McCarty’s adoption became official on Christmas Eve in 1976. A family from Vermont welcomed the toddler into their family. As indicated, she was looking for a new family because she had apparently been abandoned at a South Korea hospital after falling ill. So, she ended up in an orphanage, from which her American parents were able to adopt her.

McCarty grew up in surroundings so alien to her homeland that she might have well been living on another world, and she retained no ties to the biological family who seemingly left her behind. She told YouTube channel Korea Now in 2020 that she hadn’t known anything about her mother and father. The only facts she had were the orphanage involved and the agency that helped facilitate the process.

Holt Children’s Services had helped McCarty’s American family to adopt her after she was found at a hospital in Suwon, the capital of the country’s Gyeonggi Province. The latter is South Korea’s most heavily populated region, with more than 13 million residents as of 2020. It’s no surprise that so many people live there, really, as it’s the area that surrounds the country’s capital, Seoul.

Considering the massive size of Suwon and its surrounding cities makes the story McCarty thought she knew about her abandonment there all the more harrowing. There are so many similar stories to hers, though, as South Korea saw a boom in overseas adoptions in the aftermath of the Korean War.

The conflict – which saw North and South Korea battling against one another – ended in July 1953. In the years following, particularly between 1980 and 1989, tens of thousands of Korean children made the journey from their home country to new adoptive families in Western countries.

The Korean War spurred these overseas adoptions because many orphans had been fathered by American soldiers who had come over to support the South Korean effort. After that, post-war poverty pushed many more little ones into orphanages, and adoptive families in the West were opening their doors to those children in need.

Many of these adopted Korean children have grown up with families who accepted them and raised them as one of their own. Still, they often become inspired to look into where they came from – and a lot of that journey requires them to figure out who they came from.

If adoptive parents held onto birth certificates or other identifying documents from South Korea, it could be easy for children to find their biological families. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have much to go on – that is, until the South Korean government started a program to make that search simpler for everyone.

A trio of South Korean public bodies – its Ministry of Health and Welfare, its Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Korean National Police Agency – collaborated on a project designed to reconnect adopted children with their birth families. It would require both parties to be interested in such a reunion, though, as it wouldn’t rely on paperwork to prove these biological bonds.

Instead, these authorities set out to make DNA matches between Korean adoptees and their biological parents. The process begins when the child submits a petition to the country’s National Center for the Rights of the Child (NCRC), a public agency centered on children’s welfare. Through the NCRC, the adoptee can find their parents with or without their identifying information.

If the child knows their parents’ names, for example, the NCRC can facilitate a search for their whereabouts through national and local checks. Once they find the parents, they will obtain their consent to participate in the reunion. Those who decline effectively shut their children’s cases, while those who agree undergo a DNA test to confirm the connection before a meeting takes place.

There are options for kids who don’t know who their parents are, as well. Some rely on the news media to share their story, while others create profiles on the NCRC website. Still others will take DNA tests – and they can do so around the world – to enter into a South Korean database.

The DNA testing can connect biological children with their parents, so long as they have submitted their information into the database. In the case of Denise McCarty, she visited South Korea in 2016, and she decided then to submit her genetic information in the hopes of finding her biological family. Little did she know, her mother would do the same a year later.

It may have seemed odd at first for McCarty’s DNA to get a hit – as far as she knew, her family had abandoned her as a small child. But she got news that there was a match on her DNA in October 2020 and, mere days later, she had her first contact with her South Korean relatives.

As McCarty later admitted to Vermont TV news channel WCAX, she was understandably nervous about this initial reunion, which took place via a video call. She said, “My heart was beating 100mph. Like, I could not believe this was happening.” And, as soon as the line went live, she got the shock of her life upon seeing her biological family for the first time.

McCarty’s screen lit up with her long-lost South Korean birth mother, Lee Eung-sun, who welled up as she began to speak to the daughter she hadn’t seen for 44 years. Through an interpreter, she was able to explain why McCarty - whose birth name was Sang-ae - had ended up in an orphanage.

For years, of course, McCarty believed that she had been abandoned at a hospital after falling ill, but that wasn’t even close to the truth. Eung-sun told the heartbreaking story of how the toddler actually got separated from her biological family. It all started at Seoul’s Namdaemun Market in 1976.

McCarty had gone to the market that day with her biological grandmother and sister, Sang-Hee, who was also on the video call. Their elderly carer had been accidentally separated from the young girls, and both went missing. Fortunately, the family found Sang-Hee within three days of her disappearance. They had no idea what happened to their other daughter, though.

All the same, McCarty’s family had made it their mission to find her, and they spent years trying to do so. According to the The Korea Times newspaper, Eung-sun revealed that they even “opened businesses near where they lost [her].” These outposts – a clothes store and a lottery shop – gave her a spot from which she could search for her missing daughter every day. She said, “I looked carefully at every child that passed my shop. I never forgot you.”

So not only did the DNA tests and subsequent reconnection give McCarty the chance to find her family, but it also allowed them to learn what had happened to her after decades of wondering. An interpreter helped her explain that she had ended up in a Suwon hospital before Holt Children’s Services had facilitated her adoption to an American family.

This revelation brought Eung-sun to tears, too, because her exhaustive search for McCarty had never extended beyond South Korea’s capital city. She said, “We never imagined you’d have traveled so far down to Suwon. We only looked for you in Seoul. We never abandoned you.” The story made her biological daughter emotional – and apologetic – too.

McCarty told WCAX that she had apologized to her omma – the Korean word for “mother” – for getting lost on that fateful day. She also said she was sorry that Eung-sun spent years worrying about her. But she also thanked her biological mother for never giving up on her missing daughter, either.

Indeed, Eung-sun had plenty of proof that her search for McCarty had been an extensive one. She held onto the flyers she’d hung up when the little girl went missing, and she never left the village where they lived pre-separation in case she came back. Plus, her mom told her on the video call, “You are still registered as my daughter in Korea.”

Eung-sun later added to The Korea Times in 2021 that the family had requested a police search for their daughter. They visited orphanages across Seoul to see if she was there. They even went on TV, appearing on a program designed to reconnect guests with their lost relatives.

Unfortunately, though, not all of the relatives involved in the search had lived long enough to see the long-awaited reunion. McCarty’s grandmother – the one who lost track of her at the Seoul marketplace – had passed away. Her father had died, too, and his death tied back to the loss of his daughter. After McCarty had gone missing, he began to drink heavily, which caused terminal liver disease two decades later.

Still, McCarty said she could feel her family members were there in some sense, even if it wasn’t in the physical one. She told WCAX, “We had the reunion and I know [my father] was there in spirit because I think that he just made this happen, and I think that my maternal grandmother that lost us that day... I know she was there as well. I could just tell.”

McCarty got to meet other members of her family, though, which provided the second big surprise of the day. Sang-Hee, who also got lost that day at the market, wasn’t just the Vermont woman’s sister – she was her twin. And, as they discovered through the video call, they still looked just like one another.

On top of that, the twins uncovered so many similarities as they reconnected. Although they spoke different languages, McCarty and Sang-Hee had very similar voices. The duo both loved to travel and enjoyed the same foods. Even the things they found funny were very much alike.

Of course, that video chat was just the beginning of getting to re-know one another after four decades apart. McCarty told WCAX that she hoped to travel to South Korea as soon as possible to meet her mother, brother and sister. Until then, though, they would keep in touch through a texting app that automatically translated their messages to one another.

On that note, McCarty had a plan for becoming more immersed in her home country’s culture. Her twin agreed to start teaching her Korean – in exchange from English lessons from her American-raised sister. And, once she arrived back in South Korea, her mother promised to cook her native cuisine and some American extras, too.

According to The Korea Times, the family envisioned their future feast together while video-chatting, and Eung-sun decided that the menu was entirely up to her long-lost daughter. She adorably said, “Chicken, pizza, bulgogi [spicy meat strips] or bibimbap [rice and veg]! You name it and I will cook whatever you would like to eat.”

Of course, that would just be the beginning for the once-separated family. McCarty vowed to spend the rest of her life rebuilding the bond with her biological mother, brother and sister. As of October 2020, they had talked of her visiting South Korea, as well as her birth family arranging another rendezvous in Hawaii – a meeting in the middle.

McCarty hoped to bring both halves of her family together, too – the adoptive American one and her biological clan from South Korea. Having even more people to add into the fray made the Vermonter feel blessed, she said. As she put it, “I’ve just got this huge family now that loves me and that I love. You can’t be happier than that. You can’t ask for more than that.”

Better yet, McCarty was able to more fully understand her past and know the truth about her adoption story. And finally having that information made her feel complete. She told WCAX, “To have that missing piece of what happened to me is just incredibly overwhelming and [makes me] happy and it makes me feel whole.”

The happy ending to their tale is especially poignant when considering the fact that most South Korean adoptees never find their biological families. McCarty and her family – especially her biological mother – didn’t take that fact for granted. Eung-sun told The Korea Times, “I can’t describe how happy I am. I feel like dancing all the time. Sleepless nights thick with grief are gone now. I am so happy and can't wait to see her in person.”