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Imagine learning at 52 that you were adopted because your mother’s oncologist casually mentioned it during a phone call.

Al Isaacs had spent his life believing he was an only child with loving parents and an ordinary birth certificate. Then one accidental comment exposed a secret his family had kept for more than five decades.

There was no simple way to ask his parents for answers. Both were living with dementia, and his father was nearing the end of his life. When Al turned to an aunt, she confirmed the truth with six devastating words: “I always wanted to tell you.”

The documents Al had trusted were false. His adoption had been arranged through the gray market, leaving him with few reliable records and an enormous question: Who was Mary Smith?

In this episode, Al talks with Corey about:

• Discovering at 52 that he had been adopted
• Realizing other relatives had known the truth for decades
• Loving his parents while struggling with what they concealed
• The false paperwork behind his gray-market adoption
• Using DNA, genealogy and Search Angels to find answers
• Discovering a biological sister he never knew existed
• Searching for a birth mother with an extraordinarily common name
• Learning that Mary had been a gifted folk singer
• Finding photographs, records and performances that brought her past to life
• Using humor to tell a painful story without diminishing it

Mary’s trail leads through the Greenwich Village music scene, a 1968 talent competition hosted by Duke Ellington and recordings that had nearly disappeared. At one point, an old photograph of a woman holding a guitar becomes a vital clue in a search that repeatedly seems impossible.

Al tells the story in "Finding Mary Smith: A Memoir of Family Secrets, Gray Market Adoption, and the Miracle Reunion with My Mom," winner of the 2026 Global Book Awards Gold Medal for Biographical/Memoir. The book and audiobook are available wherever books are sold, and Al’s collection of photographs, songs and rare footage can be found at alisaacs.com.

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