Seeking Redress for a Mother’s Life in a Workhouse

Samantha Long and her twin sister, Etta Thornton-Verma, were born in 1972 and adopted at 9 months. They never knew their birth mother and decided to try to track her down in the mid-1990s. “Nothing prepared us for what we found,” Ms. Thornton-Verma, who lives in New York, recalled in a telephone interview last week. “We were prepared for the ordinary possibilities, like a teenage girl who got pregnant and wasn’t in a circumstance to keep us,” she said. “But we were not thinking that she might be incarcerated by nuns.”

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