• An adopted daughter who went in search of her birth mother discovered that they had worked together at the same beauty parlour.

  A medical test made Michelle Wetzell, 30 a manicurist from Iowa, decide to trace the mother who had given her up for adoption when she was four days old. When she and Cathy Henzen were reunited, she discovered that her mother had worked as a receptionist in the same salon where the daughter began her career as a teenage manicurist.

  “There she was, the whole time,” Ms Wetzell said.

  The reunion between mother and daughter, who look strikingly similar, was a happy one, although they had exchanged few words during their time as colleagues.

  Mrs Henzen, 55, had worked at the salon’s reception, away from the stylists and manicurists with few opportunities for interaction. “What if you had come up and we had started talking?” Mrs Henzen asked her daughter. “We would have known, I think.”

  Mrs Henzen was in the process of extricating herself from her failed marriage when she found out that she was pregnant with Michelle, her third child. “I couldn’t risk bringing another child into this family,” she said.

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