By Chhun Sun, The Gazette
For most of his life, Christopher Lupella would take out a piece of paper to do the math.
He’d take her birthdate, Jan. 3, 1974, and subtract it from the current year.
He always wanted to know the age of his baby girl. At age 3, Jennifer Lupella was separated from her father and later placed in foster care. Her mother told her not to look for her father because it wasn’t worth the effort. Some relatives even said he was dead.
But on the morning of Dec. 16, Christopher got an unexpected Facebook message from a woman named Jennifer Lupella.
“Can I ask how old you are?” the message read. “Are you from Chicago?”
Christopher was stunned.
“How old are you?” he wrote back.
The woman told him her birthdate and said she was turning 43 soon. After all the years he’d kept track of his daughter’s age, Christopher couldn’t believe what he was reading. This was a moment for which he had been waiting 40 years.
“I’m your father,” he told her.
Their exchange became another example of how Facebook and other social media platforms have been a medium for reuniting fathers, daughters, siblings and old friends all over the world.
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