Baby Abandoned In Trash Discovers She Knows Her Birth Mother

A story stranger than fiction all began when Janet Barnicoat, who was told numerous times that she was abandoned as a baby in a paper bag, began to search for her birth mother.

That search led her to a touching reunion with two half-siblings. None of the siblings even knew each other existed; they each had a different father.

When Janet got to meet her brother Dean and sister Julie, they made a shocking connection: Janet, Dean, and Julie had all been abandoned in paper bags by their mother, too!

A DNA test on Ancestry.com then made another match to a half-cousin who was shown to be genetically related to their birth mother and this cousin led them to a woman Janet had known for years – Joann Hauser.

Joann was supposedly the Good Samaritan who found Janet in the paper bag those 35 years ago. In fact, years before, Janet reunited with Joann to thank her. Janet actually had no idea she was related to Joann, and Joann never mentioned this fact at their reunion. How was this possible?

Janet then confronted Joann, who immediately came clean and said she had never told anyone who she really was. Joann was Janet, Dean, and Julie’s biological mother.

She just posed as the “Good Samaritan” to make sure that Janet would be put somewhere safe and fearing judgment, Joann never told anybody. Janet and her siblings had never been abandoned and left for dead. Their mother was just a frightened and confused woman who was trying to do right by them the only way she knew how.

The discovery that she wasn’t seen as “trash” by her birth mother was a gift in and of itself.

“I wanna say it was like a sigh of relief,” Janet said in 2016. “I had gone 15 to 20 years with that story in my head constantly, that I was tossed away, that I was thrown into a dumpster.”

Janet has forgiven her mother and holds no grudges and even thanked her.

“She did us a favor,” Janet said. “All three of us had amazing families.”