SALEM, Virginia — In August 1972, two women leaving a movie theater in Fairview Park, Ohio noticed something odd. A shopping cart was leaning against a parked car, with a neatly folded brown paper bag inside.
Then the bag began to rustle.
Inside was a newborn girl — calm, clean, dressed in a onesie and wrapped in a blanket. Police were called. The baby, nicknamed “Baby Westgate” after the shopping center where she was found, was rushed to a hospital and adopted within four months.
That baby is now Pearl Marshall, a 53-year-old music teacher living in Salem, Virginia.
Decades of Sealed Records
Pearl always knew she was adopted. What she didn’t have was any paper trail.
Ohio’s closed adoption laws kept her birth certificate sealed for decades. When the state opened adoptee records in 2015, Pearl finally had a place to start.
Her birth certificate listed an unusual birthplace: the Westgate Shopping Center. That single detail led her and her husband to an old newspaper article confirming what her adoptive mother had long suspected — Pearl was “Baby Westgate.”
A local historian then dug through archives, property records, and yearbooks to track down the two women who had originally found her. When the historian reached one of their sons by phone, the line went dead silent.
“I expected to hear the phone click,” she recalled. “Instead he said, ‘Oh my God, that was my mother.'”
The Truth Her Birth Mother Carried for 50 Years
Genetic testing led Pearl to her birth father in 2023. A genealogy research team helped locate her birth mother shortly after. They met face to face for the first time over lunch this past June.
Pearl’s birth mother was 22 and single when she gave birth. She sang lullabies to Pearl every night throughout the pregnancy. After placing Pearl in the shopping cart, she drove slow circles around the parking lot — waiting until she knew her daughter had been found safe.
She later took a job at that same shopping center and parked in the exact same spot every single day.
“What she did for me was a good thing,” Pearl says. “She knew she couldn’t keep me, as much as she wanted to.”
At that first lunch, Pearl offered her birth mother forgiveness. “It’s probably the best thing I’ve ever done for another person.”
Do you think Pearl’s birth mother made the right choice that night? Drop your thoughts in the comments.
