Allen Thomas is a 68-year-old US Army veteran. When Thomas was a 19-year-old Army sergeant stationed in South Korea, he met a Korean woman named Sun-Keum, whom he called Connie. He was there to see the birth of their twins, Sandra and James. But two years later his tour ended and he wasn’t able to get his new family to the US. When the twins turned 7, Connie offered to give Thomas the children if he could come and get them but he couldn’t afford it. Thomas tells ABC’s 20/20 that he didn’t know soon after that Connie had put the children up for adoption. When he found out in the 1980s, he searched for them but it took nearly 40 years for Thomas to find them. It was Thomas’ Facebook plea “Searching For Lost Korean-American Twins (Boy & Girl), Born in 1967) that went viral in April 2015 and brought the father and children together.
Thomas received the help of investigative genealogist Pamela Slaton, thanks to ABC’s 20/20. Slaton worked with the ABC News South Korea News Bureau to find Thomas’s adult children. When she returned to the States with the twins, 20/20’s Elizabeth Vargas was there to capture the reunion on film and to interview the family. The show will air on November 13 at 10pm on ABC.
