Long-lost family catches up in N.Y.

“I’m so happy,’’ said the woman, who was named Carlina White by her parents but was raised in Connecticut under the name Nejdra Nance.

“At the same time,’’ she said, “it’s a funny feeling, because everything’s brand new. It’s like being born again.’’

The 19-day-old baby Carlina was kidnapped in 1987 after her worried parents took her to Harlem Hospital with a fever.

No suspect was ever arrested.

Carlina’s distraught parents, Joy White and Carl Tyson, feared they would never see their daughter again.

Carlina, or Nejdra, was raised by an abusive drug addict, she told the New York Post. She said she had long suspected that she was not the woman’s real daughter.

When she got pregnant herself at 16, she asked her putative mother for a birth certificate so she could get prenatal care.

Her mother could not provide one.

She gave birth to a daughter, who is now 6, and when she recently moved on her own to Atlanta, she decided to seek out her birth parents.

The Center for Missing and Exploited Children helped her connect the dots. Then the center contacted Joy White.

“We may have found your daughter,’’ Joy White said the caller told her.

DNA tests confirmed that Nejdra was in fact Carlina.

Mother and daughter were reunited on Saturday; they were in a Manhattan hotel yesterday. The Post interviewed them at the hotel Wednesday.

“I’m sitting here and I’m in a daze, thinking, ‘Is this for real?’ ’’ Joy White told the newspaper.

“I missed the last 23 years of her life,’’ she said. “I have to take it all in, for now just take it day by day.’’

Carlina White said: “I just never gave up on finding my real mother. I just kept on pushing.’’