LDS TV host turns family searches into his life's work

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Troy Dunn built a business and a life searching for people's missing relatives and friends, and it couldn't have started any closer to home.

With his own mother.

"Mom here is the reason that I started doing this," Dunn said. "She's adopted. I grew up listening to her talk about her desire to find her birth family."

It was his first such search.

"We gathered up the information that she had found and were able to locate her family," he said. "And I placed a phone call to Mom. It was a Saturday afternoon. I said, 'Mom, are you sitting down? I'm holding the piece of paper that is your mother's phone number.'

"Mom began to weep in a way that I've never heard her cry, and I knew at that moment this is exactly what I wanted to do."

That grew into a business that is hugely successful — both in terms of finding lost people and financially. Over the past 18 years, he's found more than 40,000 people. In 2002, Dunn sold the business to the Utah-based ancestry.com but still takes an active part in searches. In addition to working as a motivational speaker, author and investigator, he's set up a lot of reunions for TV shows over the past decade.

He also finds time to be a bishop in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Fort Meyers, Fla.

Dunn's television exposure has led to his own TV show. "The Locator" debuts on cable/satellite channel WE on Saturday.

Ironically, Katie Dunn's story didn't have a happy ending. As a matter of fact, it "still makes me cry," she said.

"Her birth mother rejected her," Troy Dunn said. And she did so by using "the most painful phrase I've ever heard in my 18 years of doing this."

"She ... said, 'If I knew it was going to call, I might have aborted it.'"

Which was the toughest thing Katie Dunn could have heard.

"Now, did I take it gracefully? Not at first," she said. "But I wasn't going to push myself into someone's life where I wasn't wanted. And I knew this could be stirring up such pain. And that's the last thing I want for the woman who gave me life."

And she has no regrets.