Six Haitian siblings reunited after 30 years, including youngest adopted by Canadians
CBC
It was March 2020, just a week before the entire world shut down, when Michel Prentice received a message on LinkedIn that changed his life.
"He was like, 'I think you are my brother,'" recalled Prentice. "And he was sending me photos of myself asking, 'I think this is you?'"
Since then, he has been reconnecting with the family he never knew he had.
30-year-old Michel was born in Haiti, and adopted at just five weeks of age by his Canadian parents, Susette and David. The couple, from the tiny town of Flesherton, Ont., also adopted an 18-month-old named Jordan, who would become Michel's brother. The two grew up as the only Black children in town.
The Prentices had been told by the orphanage that Michel's mother died giving birth to him, and that his father was too poor to care for him. But what Michel didn't know was that he was the last missing piece of a family puzzle that had been torn apart three decades prior.
South of the border, 36-year-old Eloi Ferguson had been on a mission to find his biological family. His story mirrored Michel's — he'd been adopted from Haiti by a white couple from Kennebunk, Maine, and raised with adopted siblings. After years of searching, a photo dug up from a relative's family photo album with a name on the back is what finally led him to his baby brother.
"It had Prentice on it," recalled Eloi. "I immediately went on Google, and just Googled his name."
For Eloi, it was the end of a 15-year search. For Michel, it was the beginning of a family reunion he wasn't prepared for.
He would soon learn that Eloi wasn't his only brother.
In 2004, when Eloi was just 19, his adoptive father became friends with a Haitian man who spent much of each year back home, working as a bus driver. They knew it was a longshot, but his father gave the man some information about Eloi and asked him to see what he could find out about his biological family.
It turned out that Eloi had relatives living in the U.S., just a few states away.
"The next thing you know, my cousins emailed my [adoptive] father from Florida and my dad told me that I had family," said Eloi.
He met his aunt and cousins for the first time in 2005. They told Eloi that his mother's mental health had deteriorated when he was a child, and that she'd been sent to live in a care facility and was still alive.
He also learned he was one of six brothers.