Fall River Sisters Meet For The First Time

Living 3,000 miles from one another, two sisters who never met were united for the first time last week in Fall River.

According to Herald News, it all started with Laura Flanagan of Coventry RI who has been looking for her birth father for many years. She came into the world as June MacDonald and was put up for adoption by her 15-year old birth mother. Her biological father, she’s been told, never knew her mother was pregnant.

While researching her birth father, Flanagan kept coming across “Denise Lutz” on the edges of her family tree on ancestry.com. While the two are not related, they’ve spoken about their searches on opposite sides of the tree. Flanagan devoted her time to helping Denise.

Flanagan found a 1950 obituary on Josef Rodrigues of 51 Short St., Fall River, that connected the missing pieces of Lutz’s family history. The obituary said he was survived by a daughter Almerinda Rodrigues, who is also Lutz’s birth mother. When they looked at Almerinda’s obituary, it listed Geraldine Riendeau and her brother who has since passed away, as Almerinda's children.

Lutz was stunned when she found out she had a sister that was alive and lived 3,000 miles away from California, in East Bridgewater.

Denise traveled to Massachusettes to meet her sister Geraldine and have their two daugethers, Stacie (Lutz) Atwater and and Carrie (Riendeau) Crisman meet for the first time. They also visited the property of the house where there mother used to live.

After talking, the sisters believe that Lutz wasn’t really given up for adoption. They believe Almerinda was told she had a still birth and that the baby girl, Lutz, was secretly taken away and given to the landlord’s son and his wife who moved to California.

The sisters and their daughters are bonding and are planning a family vacation to California for over the summer.