Las Vegas Weekly

Located: A family reunion 40 years in the making

After Las Vegan Maren gave up looking for her birth family, they found her through a cable TV show

Family reunited: Las Vegan Maren (right) with her biological sister and mother.

We TV

The idea that television can change lives sounds outdated in an age when reality TV shows are a dime a dozen and everyone seems to be primping for their 15 minutes of fame, but when Las Vegas local Maren received a call from We TV’s The Locator, that’s exactly what happened.

Maren’s name is actually Nyree, or rather it was Nyree, until she changed it to Maren — the name her biological mother gave Maren before putting her up for adoption just after she was born.

From the age of 15, Maren had been on the hunt to find her birth parents, but after spending more than a decade paying private investigators, contacting her adoption attorney and doing research online, the trail went cold, and Maren gave up. That’s it, she told herself. It’s over.

“Everything kind of dead-ended and never went anywhere. I would get a little bit here and a little bit there, and then it would kind of stop,” says Maren. “At that point I figured it was over and it was never going to happen. ... I actually went and legally changed my name because I figured it was the only thing I was going to have from my parents.”

For the next 10 years Maren was right. She worked, got married, had a baby and left her fruitless search behind her. But then her phone rang.

Troy Dunn is “The Locator,” an investigator who’s made a career (and a cable series) out of tracking people down. In the show’s March 3 season premiere (We TV, 10 p.m.), Dunn sets his sights on Maren, whose biological sister found a picture of a mysterious little girl and asked Dunn to find out what happened to the big sister she had never known.

“The hardest thing for me was that they wanted to do this on television,” Maren remembers of the days immediately following the phone call that changed her life. “It came down to, it was go on this show and have my private life on television or never maybe meet my family. ... This to me was my last chance to know who they were. Regardless of how uncomfortable it makes me, I’m going to do it.”

That meeting — the 40-years-later reunion between mother and daughter — went by in a blur, and now Maren is catching up on decades of lost time with new siblings, nieces, nephews, aunts and uncles she never knew she had. She has trouble keeping the names and relationships straight sometimes, but that’s just part of the learning process.

“It’s like meeting a new person,” Maren says of meeting the family she’d given up on trying to find. “Just going to the park and talking to somebody and meeting them and trying to decide if you want to be friends.”