Santiago, Chile – Chris Flaherty remembers clearly the phone call in which he learned about his biological family. It was in October 2022, and he had just finished a day of teaching high school classes.
Tyler Graf, who founded the NGO Connecting Roots, told Flaherty he had three brothers from the town of Quemchi, on the island of Chiloe in southern Chile. Just 12 hours before Graf reached him over the phone, Flaherty’s birth mother — who had long believed her son to be dead — had passed away from complications related to COVID-19.
