SAN CLEMENTE : Mother Finds Child She Gave Up in ’66

After a difficult five-month search that ended in Ohio earlier this month, a private investigator finally tracked down the daughter Peggy Cullivan had given up for adoption 26 years ago.

For both mother and daughter, 26-year-old Deni Bianconi, the reunion was something they had always dreamed about.

“I’ve thought about Deni every day for the past 26 years,” said Cullivan, 47. “That’s the truth of it. You go your whole life every day and you never forget about it.”

For her part, Bianconi--who grew up as an only child in Chicago--has been calm during the emotional events of the past week, although she was shocked when she heard from the detective agency earlier this month.

“I just said ‘oh my God’ 150 times,” she said. “That’s all I could think of saying.”

While Bianconi said she always knew she was adopted, her parents were under the mistaken impression that she had spent her first six months with her birth mother.

“I thought: ‘Oh my God, I wasn’t cute enough,’ ” she said.

Soon after her parents divorced when she was 16, Bianconi was married and had two children. Now long divorced, she is working as a dental assistant and studying to become a dentist.

Until about three years ago, only Cullivan’s mother knew about the adoption, a secret Cullivan said she never learned to live with, even when she married 14 years ago and had three more children.

“You cannot keep a secret like that all your life,” said Cullivan, a Cerritos resident. “I think that kind of lie causes cancer.”

Finally in March, after hearing about Worldwide Tracers Missing Persons Bureau, a San Clemente firm that specializes in adoption cases, Cullivan said she decided to overcome her fears and guilt and initiate the search.

“My fear was that something had happened to her when she was little, that she may have died,” Cullivan said. “I was afraid I was going to find a truth I didn’t want to hear. I had an incredible fear.”

But the desire to know the truth, whatever it might be, finally won out, she said. “I just wanted to say: ‘I love you--I did the best I could.’ I just wanted to say that.”

It was back in 1965 when Cullivan, after dating Bianconi’s biological father for more than a year, found herself pregnant. Since her mother did not approve of her boyfriend, Cullivan said, and since she was helping support her family in the wake of her father’s death, she decided to give up her baby.

After concocting a story with the help of her mother, Cullivan told everyone she was going to go away to become a stewardess. Instead she went to a San Francisco home for unwed mothers and had the baby in 1966.

Ironically, just about everyone bought the stewardess story when she returned home to Norwalk--except her boyfriend, who finally learned the truth Tuesday when the detective agency was able to track him down in a matter of minutes.

While it was emotional enough to be reunited with her birth mother earlier this week, Bianconi was only a phone call away from meeting the biological father who never even knew she was born. Bianconi said she hoped to contact him and arrange a meeting in the near future with the man, who lives in the Los Angeles area.

Pat Rutherford, owner of Worldwide Tracers, said adoption cases are among the toughest to crack. “The law is against you,” he said. The cases “are just horrible because it’s somebody just trying to find your roots.”

About 40% of the 450 cases the agency handles each year involve adoptions, with many of them, such as Cullivan’s, being resolved only through the help of underground sources sympathetic to the adoption movement, he said.