Imagine having searched most of your life to find a half sister who was adopted as a baby — and suddenly learning who she is.
Imagine being that half sister, who searched for years to find her siblings and, at 55, hit pay dirt.
That is what happened to Randy Bliss of Madison, and his family.
Just over a week ago, Bliss, 63, got a message via social media from a woman named Lisa Gurr, asking that he accept her friend request. She told him they had the same mother.

Randy Bliss of Madison recently connected with a long-lost half sister through social media. Submitted photo
“I couldn’t click ‘accept’ fast enough,” Bliss said. “I sent her a message and we messaged each other for 3 1/2 hours. Then we had a 4 1/2-hour phone call. My first words to her were ‘I’m in awe. We had no clue how to find you. Thank you for finding us.'”
His newly-discovered half sister, Lisa Gurr, 55, of Jackson, Michigan had been put up for adoption when she was a month old, and she had tried for years to determine who her birth mother was, get her death certificate and her own birth certificate, and then search from there.
Bliss and Gurr’s biological mother was Janice Reiser, who had a total of six children with various men and raised them in Jackson. She died in 2013 at 75. Bliss did not meet his biological father until he was 18 and has three half siblings on his paternal side — two brothers and a sister. At one point when Bliss was growing up, he and some of his siblings were sent to live in a Catholic orphanage for four years because their mother, single at the time, had a difficult time supporting them though she worked full time in a box factory.
“We had a very dysfunctional family,” Bliss recalled Wednesday.
When he was in his 20s, he learned his mother had given an infant up for adoption back in 1969, when he was just a child.

Lisa Gurr, right, of Jackson, Mich., recently discovered long-lost brother Randy Bliss of Madison, not pictured, and reached out on social media. She also connected with Randy’s brother, William Bliss, left. Photo courtesy of Lisa Gurr
“We’ve been trying for decades to find her but we had no idea how because it was a sealed adoption,” he said.
Gurr, who has four children, ages 17 to 33, was undeterred in her quest to find family members. Through a serendipitous series of events, a family acquaintance who worked in an office where Gurr’s information was sealed happened to find something about her biological mother. Gurr then started searching other records. She doesn’t know who her biological father is.
In talking by phone recently, Bliss and Gurr learned a lot about each other, including that she has three older brothers in her adoptive family and her parents worked and provided well for them. Bliss and his siblings, on the other hand, had a tough childhood.
“I feel guilty sometimes because I didn’t,” Gurr said Wednesday in a phone interview. “I had a good childhood and stuff, but I always knew that I was adopted, and I was different.”
Gurr learned she has several half siblings living within a 5-mile radius of her in Jackson. Bliss had moved to Maine 17 years ago, as he had met his would-be wife Cathy, a Mainer.
A former member of the Madison Planning Board, Bliss is active in town affairs, although he describes himself as a “severe introvert.” He serves on the Living Well in Madison Committee, Budget Advisory Committee, Municipal Building Committee and Channel 11 board of directors. He also serves on the Acquired Brain Injury Advisory Council of Maine.
His wife suffered a stroke 2 1/2 years ago and has been in a rehabilitation center in Brewer, where he visits her regularly. Though she does not speak, they are able to communicate in other ways. She recently learned to do a thumbs-up or -down to indicate yes or no, which he called a huge achievement.
Gurr is disabled, after a 2011 diagnosis of stage 4 colon cancer. She underwent chemotherapy and radiation and was recently found to be cancer, free, she said.
She has gradually been getting to know her half siblings in Michigan, and her wish is to raise enough money to get her, and them, to Maine to meet Bliss in person and spend some long-lost time together. It makes the most sense for them to come to Maine, she said, because Bliss needs to stay here for his wife.
Bliss, Gurr and their siblings are excited, relieved and grateful to have found each other, they said. Bliss recalled Gurr telling him she was worried whether he and his siblings would accept her.
“It’s like, we’ve been looking for her forever — of course we would,” Bliss said.
Gurr said she is the happiest she has ever been since filling that lifelong void.
“When he said they were looking for me for years, it was like, ‘Oh, my God,'” she said.
As if nothing could surprise her more than the events of the last several days, Gurr said she recently learned the location of her biological mother’s gravesite near her home and decided to visit it.
“On the opposite side of the same cemetery, I visited my adoptive mom and dad’s graves,” she said. “Isn’t that crazy?”
Amy Calder has been a Morning Sentinel reporter 35 years. Her columns appear here Saturdays. She is the author of the book, “Comfort is an Old Barn,” a collection of her curated columns, published in 2023 by Islandport Press. She may be reached at acalder@centralmaine.com. For previous Reporting Aside columns, go to centralmaine.com
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