Anger, grief, joy: How one woman turned a family lie into a life full of love
CTV
48-year-old Marie Leask went on a discovery to find her true roots and dug up an extensive family tree that she never knew existed.
What started as a lie ended in lots of love for 48-year-old Marie Leask after finding answers to a decades-long journey of ancestral research.
The New Brunswick resident, who is mixed in ethnicity, found out she was adopted in her early teens. Her British parents, who she lived with in the U.K., gave her non-identifying information about her birth mother and a few relatives in Halifax, N.S., and with that, she set out for more.
Leask said her mother gave her up for adoption because she felt she could not raise her due to her mixed ethnicity. Leask found out her mother was white Nova Scotian with traces of Irish, and her father was Black Nova Scotian.
With hopes to get information on her biological mother, Leask sent out a letter to Halifax's children's aid. A week later, they sent a letter stating that they had found her mom.
"I didn't have any time to breathe in between. [My adoptive parents] had encouraged me in the first place to send the letter, they were totally in support of it," Leask told CTVNews.ca in an interview Thursday.
"It really was lovely, to start," Leask said, recalling that she and her mother, and some cousins, reconnected over phone calls and letters.
