Reunions are indeed special, and this one is truly heartwarming.
A Vietnam veteran loved sitting on a deck chair at his home in Grass Valley, California, watching the deers. He thought he’d never have any children of his own, till he received a life-changing phone call from a woman from Florida in October 2017.
Olivia Robles was born in the Philippines in 1967. She moved to the United States when she was 6 years old. At age 10, she learned that the man she thought was her dad wasn’t her birth father.
From then on, she embarked upon a lifelong search to find her biological father.
Years passed, and then decades. Robles, a mother of three, lived her first 50 years without knowing who her birth father was, until one day in September 2017, when she received a surprise from Ancestry.com.
Unexpectedly, the DNA sample she had once submitted matched that of a woman named Diana Barnes, whom she had never met but turned out to be her second cousin.
Robles got in touch with Diana, who provided her clues on who her biological father might be.
Diana told Robles that her then-78-year-old father, Gary Dean Barnes, was a Vietnam war veteran—and that he had visited the Philippines in 1966 while serving with the U.S. Navy during the war.
As promised, Barnes submitted his own DNA sample on Nov. 4, 2017, and as expected, the result confirmed Barnes to be Robles’s biological father.
“I remember vowing not to have children,” Barnes said. He never imagined he’d end up having a daughter, three grandsons, and a great-grandson.
He never knew she was pregnant.
Finally, in late November that year, Robles flew from Florida to Reno-Tahoe International Airport in Nevada to meet her biological father, whom she'd longed to meet for the last 40 years.
Barnes and his wife, Caryl, were there waiting for her. Seeing her birth father after so many years was “truly a miracle.”
In December 2018, Robles shared her experience on Ancestry.com, saying, “Miracles do happen! I can attest to that after finding my biological father thanks to Ancestry.com that resulted in a DNA match with my second cousin Diana Barnes.”
She further added: “This last year has been amazing; we are truly blessed to have found one another! We have been spending a lot of time together to make up for all the years of being apart. We love sharing our story as an inspiration to others that miracles can happen—don’t give up on your dreams!”