We all make dozens of decisions every day.
And good or bad, those decisions can be harder to change as time moves on.
But every so often, a person gets another chance.
"You think about her every day, all those years," says Linda Bailey. She decided to give up her six week old daughter Jacqueline to adoption in 1970. Because she wanted her daughter to grow up with two parents.
"My parents were divorced when I was young, and I wanted her to have two parents, being that her father wasn't in the picture during the pregnancy."
Jacqueline's father, Lawrence Cook regrets that decision.
"I was fresh out of the army, I wasn't secure in a job really, and I was really mixed up about the war and other things, so it was one of the main regrets of my life that I didn't carry through with that," says Cook.
But Monday, a new decision solved a puzzle 42 years in the making.
"It's like having a new child, that's neat, it's the best thing in the world."
Cook was able to re-unite with his daughter Jacqueline Knuist. A meeting that needed a private company to find Knuist in California. Where she's lived since the adoption.
"No one can understand that feeling, of you know, meeting them for the first time," says Knuist.
She's wondered about her birth parents since she was 13. After a cousin spilled the beans about being adopted.
"Now that I found them, I'm so happy because there was always something missing, in my life."
Missing, but Cook says, not broken.
"It's funny how things turn out, and it's all right after all."
Tracking down birth parents or their children is difficult to do.
Most states require a court order to release the original sealed birth certificates.
Both Iowa and Illinois require both sides to agree to release that information.
