Anna Samuelsson, 59, grew up in Sweden with almost no memory of South Korea, Channel News Asia reported.

While searching for her origins, she was played an old recording of a young girl she did not recognize singing a children’s song. She was told the girl in the recording was her at age five, recorded shortly before leaving South Korea.

“It’s like another child. It’s not me,” she said.

Catherine Harned, 57, was sent to the U.S. at age seven. For years, she was kept in the dark about her past.

Through an investigative program by Channel News Asiashe and Samuelsson learned they are biological sisters and reunited. They were separated in 1974 and sent to different continents under adoption files labeling them as “orphans.”

After the Korean War ended in 1953, sending children abroad for adoption became a booming industry in South Korea as a response to widespread poverty. Demand for adoption rose in the U.S. and Europe as many Western countries faced a shortage of adoptable children.

More than 200,000 South Korean children were sent abroad for adoption under documents that were often incomplete, unverified or deliberately falsified to speed up the process. Many of them grew up without knowing their origins or the reasons for their separation.

By the 1970s, transnational adoptees, most of them from South Korea, accounted for about 1-2% of all newborns in Sweden.

Madeleine Bjork, 43, was sent to Sweden at age two and grew up believing she had been abandoned due to post-war hardship.

But when she met her biological family, she learned her grandmother had secretly placed her in an orphanage. By the time her mother found out, the overseas adoption process had been completed.

Han Tae-soon, 70, spent more than 40 years searching for her daughter, who was abducted at age four while playing outside their home. The child was taken to an orphanage, given a new name, assigned falsified documents as an “abandoned orphan with no known parents,” and sent to the U.S. for adoption.

“They took her away while she was playing in front of the house. They kidnapped her.

“She used to live with the thought that I’d sold her,” Han said.

They located each other through DNA testing and met in Seoul in 2019.

Han has sued the South Korean government, the orphanage, and Holt Children’s Services, the agency that handled the adoption.

Kim Do-hyun, president of KoRoot, a non-profit supporting adoptees in South Korea, said incomplete, incorrect or missing records were common at the time.

“Children could be declared adoptable with minimal investigation. Financial incentives may have played a role.

“The adoption agents could make money, one person’s yearly salary from one child,” he said.

Samuelsson’s search for her birth family has stalled. Her sister, now settled in the U.S., has not offered help as she sees no reason to revisit the past.

“I have no desire to pursue it.” Harned said. “This is my home.”

In 2025, a Swedish commission recommended ending international adoptions after an investigation found decades of fraud, abuse and illegal practices.

Later the same year, South Korea banned private agency adoptions and said it plans to phase out overseas adoptions by 2029.