Jennifer Skiles was 3 years old when she was adopted, but she always wondered about her origins. At 19, she began searching for her biological parents and spent half her life looking. What she didn’t know was that her father didn’t know she existed.
Jennifer Skiles was born in 1979 at a military base in Germany. Her mother, Cheryl Brown, placed her for adoption out of fear of a violent relationship. Jennifer was adopted at 3 by a family she remembers fondly, but when she was 18, her adoptive father died, and seven years later, her mother did too. Alone once again, she decided it was time to search for her roots.
The young woman and her mother reunited and became inseparable. They spoke every day. Then, in 2017, a car accident took her mother away, but before she died, she gave Jennifer a name: Paul Lonardo, a soldier with whom she had a brief romance in the late 70s.
In 2022, a DNA test led her to Rhode Island, and after a great deal of research, she managed to get Paul’s phone number and speak with him for the first time: “It was like coming home, as if I’d known him my whole life”.
To the man’s surprise, he didn’t know he had a daughter.
“If he had known, he never would have placed her for adoption”.
For four years, they visited each other, and Jennifer’s children started calling him Grandpa. That’s when he made up his mind: He asked his daughter if she wanted him to adopt her.
On January 22, 2026, at Cranston City Hall, Paul became her father in the eyes of the law. The room applauded, and many people cried.
He couldn’t be there for her childhood, but he chose to be there for the rest of her life.