A 72-year-old Indiana woman is hoping that a Christmas miracle will help her find the long-lost son she gave up for adoption in 1963. 
 
 When she was 19, Geraldine “Jerri” Kramer gave birth to a healthy, curly-haired boy on June 10, 1963, in Indianapolis, but was forced by her parents and her priest to give him up, she told ABC News today. 
 
 “They said [he] was not welcome in their home,” Kramer said. 
 
 Courtesy of Marie Henson 
 
 But Kramer said she always wondered and prayed about her first born, whom she named Jack after her father. She said there has been a “hole” her family since she last saw him. 
 
 “I went along with it,” Kramer said, adding that she bonded with the infant when the nurses let her hold him. “But, now I’m sorry [I did].” 
 
 Her younger sister was the only other family member who knew about her first pregnancy, Kramer said. She would visit her at the St. Elizabeth Girls Home in Indianapolis, where young girls would stay to receive maternity care. 
 
 But in 1988, when her eldest daughter contemplated giving up her third child for adoption, Kramer showed up to the hospital and revealed her secret, telling her she would regret it. 
 
 “It was the single most important thing to ever happen to me,” Marie Henson said. 
 
 Courtesy of Marie Henson 
 
 Not even her husband, Joseph, whom she married in 1966, knew about the baby boy she gave up three years before they wed, Henson said. 
 
 “He’s always been supportive and compassionate,” 49-year-old Henson said of her father when he found out about the baby. “It’s just as important to him to find him, for her sake.” 
 
 Kramer’s declining health inspired her to ask her children to help find their older brother, who would now be 52 years old. 
 
 Courtesy of Marie Henson 
 
 A meme created with a photo of her five children created reads, “If you were born 6-10-63 you’re our older brother; we’re looking for you.” The post been shared more than 41,000 times as of today. 
 
 The picture was taken on Thanksgiving day. 
 
 Since Indiana is a “mutual consent state,” agencies need consent from both parties in order to unseal the adoption records. If Kramer’s first born has not registered for mutual consent, they will not release his information unless he has died. 
 
 Henson said she “will not stop” until she finds her brother. 
 
 “I hope he’s had a wonderful life with great adoptive parents,” she said. “But I think there’s room in the heart for more people who love you.” 
 
 Kramer’s 43-year-old son, Marc, told ABC News he thinks his oldest brother would “click instantly” with the family. 
 
 “It would fill a void,” he said. “We would love to be able to give this to her.” 
 
 In addition to her five children, Kramer has eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. She said she’s “anxious” to find out if she has more. 
 
 All of Kramer’s immediate family lives in the central Indiana area, Marc said, calling his family "tight-knit." 
 
 "Maybe I know him," he said of of his oldest brother. "Maybe he lives near me." 
 
 Kramer said she already knows what she would say if she saw her first-born again. 
 
 "I would tell him that I’ve loved him for years and years and years,” she said. ||||| Geraldine "Jerri" Kramer was 19 in the summer of 1963 when she was forced by her parents to give up her newborn son for adoption. 
 
 Now, more than 50 years later, the ailing 72-year-old mom wants to meet the son she never knew – and her family has taken to social media to find him. Catholic Social Services, which took custody of Kramer's newborn, never told her where the infant she called "Jack" would be going. 
 
 "The nurses misunderstood that I was giving him up for adoption and so they put him in my arms right after birth before taking him away," Kramer told FoxNews.com. "I want him to know that I have always loved him." 
 
 "I want him to know that I have always loved him." - Geraldine "Jerri" Kramer 
 
 Kramer, whose maiden name is Hummel, was 19 and unmarried when she learned she was pregnant -- a secret kept from her own siblings. At the urging of her parents and a local priest, she spent a month at St. Elizabeth Girls Home in Indianapolis, where young women once stayed to receive maternity care and hide their pregnancies. 
 
 On the night of June 10, 1963, Kramer gave birth to a healthy, curly-haired boy at nearby Marion County General Hospital. Kramer, all alone, was lying in a bed for several minutes holding her infant son before he was taken by nurses. 
 
 "I named him after my father. His name was Jack," Kramer said. 
 
 Related Image Expand / Contract Kramer is pictured here at age 18 in 1962. (FoxNews.com) 
 
 Years would pass, but the memory of her first-born child -- and what might have become of him -- would never leave Kramer, who lives in Fortville, Ind., and whose health is failing. 
 
 "I pray for him every night," said Kramer, who suffers from diabetes and a serious heart condition, among other ailments. 
 
 Kramer married her husband, Joseph, on May 7, 1966, and together the couple have five children, eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. 
 
 Related Image Expand / Contract Kramer with her husband, Joseph, on their wedding day in 1966. (FoxNews.com) 
 
 On Thanksgiving, Kramer's children decided they would use social media to find their brother. On Nov. 27, the following day, the family posted a photo and message on Facebook that has now been shared by nearly 42,000 people. 
 
 "We have joined and searched adoption registries," the siblings wrote. "We're praying this may work, as it has for others. It has been Mom's decades-long wish to find you, and we would love to meet our big brother." 
 
 Marie Henson, Kramer's oldest child, told FoxNews.com that her mother "asked us to renew our search in earnest" after she had open heart surgery last year. 
 
 "My mom feels the need to see him," said 49-year-old Henson. "She's been marking his age this entire time and wonders about him every day." 
 
 Related Image Expand / Contract Kramer, 72, is pictured at her home in Fortville, Ind. (FoxNews.com) 
 
 The Kramer family is not alone in its quest. Thousands of people are turning to Facebook to help find a biological child or parent due to the legal difficulty of obtaining confidential adoption records. Kelley Baumgartner, also from Indiana, used the social media site to locate her birth mother who gave her to Catholic Social Services in South Bend in 1987. In February, Baumgartner posted her plight to Facebook -- which was shared by 340,000 people and seen by her biological mother, who contacted her two weeks later, according to local reports. 
 
 The process of locating a biological relative is a challenge, logistically and psychologically. 
 
 "I usually get about 40 requests like this a month," said Katrina Carlisle of St. Elizabeth Coleman Pregnancy & Adoption Services, a non-profit adoption agency that is part of Catholic Charities Indianapolis. 
 
 Carlisle, who cannot comment on individual cases, explained that Indiana is a "mutual consent state," meaning all adoption records are sealed unless both parties consent to have the records unsealed. Those seeking to locate a biological parent or child must file paperwork to join the adoption history registry with the Indiana State Department of Health, according to Carlisle. The state then looks to see if the other party has registered, in which case there is a match. If there is no match, families often ask Carlisle to do a search for a fee of $350. 
 
 "It takes a long time to track people down," said Carlisle. "But all my difficulties are in the emotional realm. The worst thing that happens to me is when I find a birth mother who wants no contact with her child." 
 
 "There is nothing I can do about that," said Carlisle, who has been conducting such searches for 24 years. "If they say no, it ends right there. And that is very painful for them." 
 
 The Kramer family, meanwhile, said they are praying their brother -- who would now be 52 years old -- is alive and able to contact them. 
 
 "I have this feeling it could happen before the holidays," Henson said. "We are praying for a Christmas miracle." 
 
 Cristina Corbin is a New York-based reporter for FoxNews.com. Follow her on Twitter @CristinaCorbin. ||||| article 
 
 Did doctors and the Catholic Church traffic in stolen newborns? Mike Elkin reports from Madrid on the shocking trial of one nun. 
 
 On his deathbed five years ago in Barcelona, Juan Moreno told his son Juan Luis the family secret: we bought you from a priest in 1969. Moreno Sr. paid 150,000 pesetas, more than what he paid for their apartment seven years earlier. DNA tests have revealed that Juan Luis’s birth certificate, which names his adoptive parents as his birth parents, is false. And Antonio Barroso, Juan Luis’s best friend, was also bought from the same priest, according to Juan Luis. The two families would take summer vacations together to Zaragoza, around 300 kilometers west of Barcelona, but the men now believe the trips’ true purpose was to pay the installments on the two boys to the clergyman, Juan Luis says. 
 
 “My adoptive family gave me plenty of love, but it’s also true that my life has been a lie,” Juan Luis says over the telephone from Barcelona. 
 
 Moreno is one of thousands of Spaniards who suspect that doctors, nurses, priests, and nuns stole and sold babies between the 1960s and the early 1980s. While the 1,500 open cases vary, a common story has a woman being told her newborn has died shortly after birth. The baby is sold to another couple, and official papers are doctored so this couple appeared as the biological parents. At one infamous Madrid clinic, now closed, called San Ramón, it was reported in the Spanish media that staff kept a dead newborn in the freezer to prove to mothers that their babies had died. 
 
 Spanish police investigated a handful of cases in the early 1980s, but only within the last few years has the nationwide scope of the alleged trafficking started to take shape. 
 
 On Thursday, a Madrid judge is scheduled to question 80-year-old Sister María Gómez Valbuena on charges of illegal imprisonment (it is called illegal imprisonment instead of kidnapping because under Spanish law kidnapping involves a ransom). The case began when Marisa Torres filed accusations against the nun after meeting her daughter Pilar, now 29, for the first time last year. Torres had gone to Sister María at the Santa Cristina clinic in 1982 after seeing a magazine ad for expectant mothers who needed social assistance. Torres had separated from her husband, and the father of the baby was another man. Torres told a judge last week that after giving birth, Sister María intimidated her into giving up the child. The nun, Torres said, threatened to denounce her to authorities for being an adulteress, saying they would likely take away her 2-year-old daughter. When Pilar and her adoptive father began to investigate her roots, they spoke to Sister María. She told them Pilar’s mother was a prostitute and to forget about her, Pilar said. Sister María hasn’t responded to the charges. 
 
 Despite the recent number of cases being investigated, Spanish authorities have largely avoided the issue in the past, taking years to confirm what people had been talking about for decades (Sister María, for example, was named in a story in Interviú magazine about alleged child trafficking at her clinic in 1982). To assist those searching, Moreno and Barroso decided to found Anadir, now the largest association, of around 1,100 people, who are looking for parents, children, and siblings. 
 
 “It’s sad that the Spanish justice system is incapable of doing its job,” Moreno says. “We’ve given them false birth certificates, false death certificates, we’ve opened empty coffins, and supplied hundreds of testimonies. What more do they need?” This Thursday, the Spanish justice minister will be meeting with representatives of some of the families to discuss their grievances. 
 
 Internet groups have connected searchers across the country. Websites and Facebook pages abound with stories and pleas: 
 
 “I’m looking for my biological family. I was adopted in 1961 and my papers are full of irregularities. Thanks and good luck to everyone.” 
 
 “I’m searching for my brother or sister, born in Bilbao on January 27, 1972. They took the baby away right after the birth. Strange things happened, and a few hours later they told my mother that the baby had died. They refused to show it to her.” 
 
 “I’m looking for my brother who was born on October 11, 1964 in Málaga and was said to have died four days later, but it doesn’t appear that he was buried. We know that the dates and places of birth are not reliable.” 
 
 
 
 Courts are now looking into baby-trafficking cases in Valencia, the Basque Country, Madrid, Catalonia, Andalusia, and the Canary Islands. 
 
 “I view this baby-stealing network like a mafia,” says Enrique Vila, a Valencia-based lawyer who works on behalf of the five associations that provide support for people looking for their biological families. “If this wasn’t organized, how did babies born in Valencia end up in Galicia, around 1,000 kilometers away?” The Catholic Church in Spain has declined to respond to the allegations, and declined to talk to The Daily Beast for this story. Vila, who was adopted and suspects he might have been taken from his biological mother, said that he believes hospital staff perpetrated these thefts for money and the church acted as a distribution network. “The nuns and priests justified what they did by saying that the child was better off with the adoptive family, but they still took the money,” he said. 
 
 Even legal adoptions signed by a judge and sealed by a notary have been found to contain false information, as revealed in numerous investigations brought by adopted children and their families. So there is a heightened sense of uncertainty among Spanish adoptees. Last year in Barcelona, during the first meeting between a mother and her 40-year-old daughter, the latter read her own death certificate. 
 
 With nothing to trust, Spaniards are erring on the side of suspicion. But sometimes the trails don’t lead to trafficking. Last year a woman from León, Spain, whose twin sister supposedly died at birth, began to question the official story after reading about other cases in the press. On the Internet she found a woman who shared the same age and an uncanny resemblance. DNA tests, however, came back negative. Likewise, a few recent grave exhumations and subsequent DNA tests showed no wrongdoing. Nevertheless, other exhumations have revealed coffins filled with rocks, an adult femur, and the bones of another baby, according to various reports in the Spanish media. 
 
 Allegations of church-condoned baby trafficking are not confined to Spain. Investigations by the press and the government into similar allegations in Australia found that Catholic hospitals from the 1950s to 1970s coerced women using drugs to sign adoption papers or to simply knock them out long enough to whisk the baby away. Catholic Health Australia, the largest nongovernment health provider in the country, has formally apologized for what happened. 
 
 Get The Beast In Your Inbox! Daily Digest Start and finish your day with the smartest, sharpest takes from The Daily Beast Cheat Sheet A speedy, smart summary of news and must-reads from The Daily Beast and across the Web By clicking "Subscribe," you agree to have read the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy Subscribe Thank You! You are now subscribed to the Daily Digest and Cheat Sheet. We will not share your email with anyone for any reason 
 
 The effects of the Spanish trafficking have reached the United States as well. Austin-based Randy Ryder thought he was born in the Spanish city of Málaga to his Austrian mother and American father, but the truth came out 12 years ago. Last October, Ryder appeared in a BBC report because a Spanish woman believed him to be her lost brother. DNA tests proved negative, but his biological mother, who now lives in London, saw the show and reached out to him on Facebook. This time, the DNA matched. 
 
 New Yorker Maria Washbourn was born in Spain in 1961, but through the church and an intermediary was adopted by an American couple. A friend noticed a physical resemblance between her and a Madrid man, Vicente González Olaya, who writes a blog about the search for his missing older sister. “It’s a long-shot,” says González, who also covers the auto industry for El País newspaper, “but we’re waiting for the DNA results to come back.” 
 
 González has kept an online record of his investigation, an often surreal account of dealing with the church, hospitals, DNA labs, and Spain’s vast bureaucracy of registrars and archives. 
 
 The nuns, he said, told his devoutly Catholic mother that the baby had choked to death on the umbilical cord, even though his mother saw the child alive. After his parents died early last year, González started to make some inquiries. Nothing made sense.
– Five siblings may have found their long-lost older brother thanks to a Facebook post. Their mother, 72-year-old Geraldine "Jerri" Kramer, gave birth to a baby in 1963, when she was 19 and unwed, but the Indiana woman's parents and priest made her give the boy up for adoption. Still, she bonded with the infant as soon as she held him, and never stopped thinking about him, she tells ABC News. Kramer, whose maiden name was Hummel, called the baby Jack, Fox News reports. He remained a secret from much of her family, even the husband she married in 1966. But in 1988, when her oldest daughter was considering giving up a child for adoption, Kramer told her the story and warned her daughter she'd regret parting with the baby. Then, as her health started to decline, Kramer asked her kids to help her find her own lost child. The five of them took a group photo on Thanksgiving and added the words, "You were born 6-10-63. You're our older brother, we're looking for you." They posted it on Facebook, where it's been shared nearly 45,000 times. "You were born June 10, 1963 in the wee AM hours, at Marion County General Hospital, in Indianapolis, Indiana. You were placed for adoption through Catholic Social Services," reads the post. "It has been Mom's decades-long wish to find you, and we would love to meet our big brother." In an update Monday, Marie Henson added, "I THINK WE FOUND HIM!! He saw the article, and DNA tests are our next step!" No further updates have been posted yet, but should Kramer—who also has eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren—find her long-lost biological son, she says she'll tell him "that I’ve loved him for years and years and years." (When these two long-lost siblings met, they realized they'd known each other for years.)