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 had no idea she existed.
Jennifer Skiles was born in 1979 at a military base in Germany. Her mother, Cheryl Brown, gave her up for adoption out of fear of a violent relationship. She 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 died 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. Until a car accident took her mother in 2017, but before she died, she left her a name: Paul Lonardo, a soldier with whom she had a brief affair 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 felt like coming home, as if she’d known him all her life”.
To the man’s surprise, he had no idea he had a daughter.
“If he had known, he never would have given her up 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 dad 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.