For 29 years, Father’s Day was just another Sunday for Terrell Starr.
Thanks to a simple inquiry on Facebook, it’s now a day to celebrate with a father who didn’t know he existed for nearly three decades.
Starr grew up in a rough part of Detroit under the care of his grandmother, with a mother off in the military and a father he never knew who was absent from his life. Meanwhile, his father was living his life not knowing he had a son.
That all changed one day in 2009 when Starr logged into Facebook and searched for the name “Chris Truesdale’’ in an attempt to see if his father might be out there.
“I didn’t believe that anyone would actually reply because I was just so used to being without him,’’ Starr told Willie Geist in an interview that aired on TODAY Friday. “I thought that I was going to live the remaining years of my life without knowing who my father was.”
Truesdale had only purchased a computer two weeks before he saw Starr’s message. He logged on to his Facebook account at his home in the Bronx to a message from a stranger saying with the subject line “looking for a father.” At the time, Starr was 5,000 miles away, studying in Ukraine on a Fulbright Scholarship.
Truesdale knew immediately that he had just met his 29-year-old son for the first time. There would be no trips to tabloid talk shows to determine paternity.
“When I saw the picture…oh yeah,’’ Truesdale told Geist. “We don’t have to go to Maury (Povich).”
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