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Woman discovers at 70 that she was not light-skinned but actually white

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(PHOTO: Getty Images/Gallo Images)
(PHOTO: Getty Images/Gallo Images)

According to BET, Byrd had never questioned her ethnicity while growing up in the home of her adoptive African-American parents until she started looking for her biological parents in 2014, which was when she discovered that her parents were white.

Speaking during an interview on KEN 5, Byrd revealed that all her life she never knew what she was, "It was never told to me that I was white," she explained.

Byrd, who was originally named Jeanette was born to Daisy and Earl Beagle a poor white family in Kansas City in the 1940s according to court papers, until she was deserted by her biological father Earl along with her four other sisters leaving her mother with no option but to look for work.

While out looking for work Byrd’s biological mother was involved in a trolley accident leaving her no choice but to sign over her children to the Missouri State officials while she recovered.

It was during the retrieval of her four sisters that Byrd was left behind and taken in by adoptive parents Ray and Edwinna Wagner.

“They didn’t raise me, they didn’t teach me, they did not educate me – they were just biological parents on paper,” she said speaking on her biological parents.

Although Byrd did try to reconnect with her biological sisters, their reunion was cut short after one of them called her by the N word.

Byrd has since gone onto tell her complicated life story in a book she published in 2017, titled Seventy Years of Blackness.

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