Joellen Cottrell gave birth to a boy at age 16 and gave him up for adoption, but she had always been eager to reconnect with him. As it turned out, he was living right across the street from Cottrell's daughter.
Joellen Cottrell was only 16 when she gave birth to her first child, a boy, at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. She barely got a glimpse of her newborn son before turning him over to the nurses and giving him up for adoption. Though she wasn’t ready to be a mother at the time, she always wondered what had become of him and how he was doing with his new family. Later, after she gave birth to other children, she told them about their long-lost brother.
“My girls always knew that they had a brother,” she told KTBS News. “I’ve always looked for him.”
Though she searched for the young man throughout the coming decades, Cottrell didn’t find a trace of her son for 32 years—until a recent phone call from her daughter, Candace Eloph, brought some shocking news.
Cottrell’s son, Jamie Wheat, lived right across the street from Eloph in Shreveport, Louisiana.
Wheat had been living there with his adoptive parents for the last eight months, and over time, he and Eloph became friends. When Wheat told Eloph when his birthday was, she mentioned that the brother she’d never met had been born on the same day. Wheat told her that, like Eloph’s brother, he had also been adopted. He knew that his mother was 16 at the time. So was Joellen Cottrell.
The more facts Wheat and Eloph traded about their lives, the more certain they became that Wheat was Eloph’s long-lost brother. So Eloph called her mother, who drove all night to come and meet the man that she believed to be her son.
To be sure of their familial connection, Wheat ordered a test to match a DNA sample against Cottrell’s to find out if she was his mother. His hands were shaking as he opened the envelope to see the results.
According to the test, their hunch was right on target: there was a 99.995 percent chance that Cottrell was Wheat’s biological mother.
Eloph, Cottrell, and Wheat’s adoptive parents were all there to support him when he revealed the discovery, and the entire group was elated by the DNA test results.
“It just almost knocked me out for the joy,” said Ann Wheat, his adoptive mother.
Now that Jamie has been reunited with his lost relatives, he’s eager to make up for all the lost years.
“I feel like a weight has been lifted off of me,” he told CNN. “I can move forward. Like a new beginning.”