Man Finds Birth Mother in Minutes Using ChatGPT After 20 Years

Avtar Singh spent 20 years searching for his birth mother with almost nothing to go on. ChatGPT found her in two hours.

Singh grew up in Amritsar, India, raised by his grandmother who called him Titu. At nine, he flew alone to Canada to join his father, wearing a three-piece suit and speaking no English. The woman he thought was his mother treated him coldly, once leaving him home alone for two weeks while the family vacationed.

Years later, his grandmother revealed the truth to his wife Rosey. Singh was his father's son from a first marriage. His father gave him only a first name: Savinder.

The search became urgent when Rosey's pregnancy required genetic history he couldn't provide. "I couldn't tell them anything about my mother's family history," Singh said. "It hit me right in the heart."

For years, he came up empty. Savinder is a common Punjabi Sikh name, and Singh refused DNA tests, worried about privacy as a chartered accountant.

On May 8, recovering from cancer treatment in southern France, he woke early and tried something new. He typed what little he knew into ChatGPT: a woman named Savinder, age 87 to 97, probably with the middle name Kaur, connected to India, Africa, and maybe the UK.

The AI returned Savinder Kaur Nagi, born 1936 in Kisumu, Kenya, and cited a tribute article. Singh knew AI could fabricate results, but this referenced a real article written by London jewelry designer Nicci Dhamu about her mother who died in December 2024.

The tribute described a woman pulled from school in Kenya and married off near Amritsar. When the marriage failed, her family brought her home. Her husband's family took back her son. She never told her other children about him.

In her final years with dementia, she cried out "Mera bacha." My child.

Singh emailed Nicci at 8:36 that morning. It arrived on what would have been her mother's 90th birthday. Two hours after his initial prompt, they spoke by phone.

"Did she have any children?" Singh asked. "Yes. She had a son." "Titu, is that you?" Nicci asked. "Are you Titu, my mother's son?"

Singh and his wife both started crying. "That's who I am," he said. "But I haven't heard anyone pronounce my nickname that way since my grandma called me that when I was a little boy."

Sunny's Take

Singh always believed his mother gave him up to move on with her life. Learning she cried for him changed everything. "That's all I need to hear," he said. "It just feels so good to know that I was loved."

Neither he nor Nicci wants a DNA test. "This world has a few billion people in it," Singh said. "And if somebody can randomly call me Titu, I don't think I need any more verification than that."

He was in London within days to meet the family his mother built after losing him.