Woman who spent two decades searching for her mother discovers she already knows her

40-year-old had unknowingly worked alongside her long-lost mother for two years

Jenny Thomas was shocked when she was handed a photo of her mother and recognised the face (TLC)

A 40-year-old woman spent two decades searching for her mother, only to find that she used to work with her.

Jenny Thomas, from New York, appeared on TLC’s reality TV show Long Lost Family in an attempt to find her mother, whom she believed she hadn’t seen since she was adopted at the age of four.

A preview for the show, which airs on Sunday, shows Ms Thomas being handed a photo of her mother and exclaiming “Oh my God, I know her!”

Ms Thomas spoke to the New York Post about her experience, and explained that she had worked for two years alongside the woman who she would later found out was her birth mother.

Ms Thomas frequently interacted with her mother, Nita Valdez, at a hospital where she worked part time as a care technician. She told the Post that the two frequently interacted at work.

“I had looked in so many faces for so many years, [thinking] ‘Could that be her? Is she looking at me because she knows me?’” Ms Thomas told the Post. “All the while I had looked at the woman who once knew me as her daughter.”

Ms Thomas said that she had not felt any kind of instinctual connection towards the woman, but they did get on well. She Ms Valdez would laugh at her jokes, but that said “We never went past a working-professional relationship at all.”

Ms Thomas’s story will be told alongside that of 15 others trying to find their parents on Long Lost Family.