BACKGROUND:  This story begins during a time when pregnancy out of wedlock carried a social stigma. To avoid being shunned and publicly ridiculed, the young women were sent away, many against their will, to live in secrecy at homes for unwed mothers in exchange for giving up their babies for adoption.

In the 1980's, a woman's daughter dies. She prevents her son's child from being aborted. The pregnant young woman and her mother want the baby, but her father threatens to disown her if she keeps it. Neither the birth father nor his mother have any legal rights to his daughter that's placed for adoption. Social Services will permit them and the birth mother to write letters without identifiable information for the baby's adoption file. The baby, who's named Stephanie, will be permitted to have a copy of her birth file after she's twenty-one. The grandmother puts clues to the birth family's identity in her letter. Social Services destroys most of her letter.

The rest of the story can only be described as divine intervention.  Even though their families live over a hundred miles apart, Stephanie and her grandmother's lives are divinely intertwined.  They are placed directly in each other's path over and over again.  It's an effective drama about the tenacity of family love.

The short film, The Ultimate Gift, covers the first part of the  story.  Filming of the feature film will soon be finished under the title Letters to Stephanie. See the Film Festival Awards list on the Press Inquiries page.