This is the inspiring and “page-turning” (Booklist) true story of a man who discovered that he had been kidnapped as a baby–and how his quest to find out who he really is upturned the genealogy industry, his own family, and set in motion the second longest cold case in US history.

In 1964, a woman pretending to be a nurse kidnapped an infant boy named Paul Fronczak from a Chicago hospital.

Two years later, police found a boy abandoned outside a variety store in New Jersey. The FBI tracked down Dora Fronczak, the kidnapped infant’s mother, and she identified the abandoned boy as her son. The family spent the next fifty years believing they were whole again–but Paul was always unsure about his true identity.

Then, four years ago–spurred on by the birth of his first child, Emma Faith–Paul took a DNA test. The test revealed that he was definitely not Paul Fronczak. From that moment on, Paul has been on a tireless mission to find the man whose life he’s been living–and to discover who abandoned him, and why.

Poignant and inspiring, The Foundling is a story about a child lost and a faith found, about the permanence of families and the bloodlines that define you, and about the emotional toll of both losing your identity and rediscovering who you truly are.

A man desperate to know his true identity struggles to solve the infamous kidnapping that nearly destroyed his family–and find his twin sister, who has been missing for more than fifty years.

When he was ten years old, Paul Fronczak was snooping around for Christmas presents in a crawl space in his family’s Chicago home. There, he found hundreds of old newspaper clippings about the kidnapping of a one-day-old infant in a hospital in 1964. He also learned that, two years later, the boy was found and returned to his family–and that the boy was him.

Nearly fifty years later, Paul, acting on long-held suspicions, took a DNA test that proved he was not the kidnapped boy. In an instant, he found himself at the center of two half-century-old mysteries–who was he, and where was the real Paul?

True Identity is about three separate major investigations–the hunt for the real Paul Fronczak; the search for the author’s missing twin sister Jill; and finally, the investigation into his true identity, his heart and soul and the demons inside him–inherited and created–that still need to be confronted.

Includes bonus PDF with images.