We love sharing heartwarming tales with you here on Upworthy, and this one was just too good to keep to ourselves. Imagine being a child your entire life and not knowing you have a sister. Mary McLaughlin and Diane Ward experienced precisely that. Despite being adopted and having been born three years apart, neither woman realized the other existed until she took a DNA test through MyHeritage. It took 56 years for them to become aware of one another.
McLaughlin and Ward never knew each other while growing up and spending time with their adopted relatives in the other’s city. McLaughlin frequented Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to see family while residing in Detroit, Michigan. Ward frequented Detroit to see family while residing in Pittsburgh. It seems as though they were destined to run into one another. It only gets stranger. Strangely enough, both sisters briefly resided in Michigan as young children, and they did so just a few blocks apart.
McLaughlin had an intermittent relationship with their real mother, but when she left them with the babysitter and didn’t come back, the babysitter and her husband were given formal guardianship of McLaughlin. According to People, McLaughlin’s mother became a “peripheral character.” According to McLaughlin, who spoke to the Mirror, her mother would not give up her parental rights, therefore she was never legally adopted. Unfortunately, their mother passed away of breast cancer when McLaughlin was 26 years old, many years before the two sisters were linked by DNA.
“We were literally simply crossing back and forth much of our youth,” Ward told People. Evidently, despite frequenting the same bakery, the two never crossed paths. It’s just bizarre, said Ward. spooky weird because the entire time we were basically in a circle.
DNA tests performed at home, which have grown in popularity recently, have been known to reveal family secrets, support suspicions, or, if your family is a bit less scandalous, reveal your ancestry. After spitting into a tube, you must wait. Your genealogy findings are eventually sent to you through email, and typically the most exciting thing to learn is that Grandma Gina lied and you aren’t Italian after all. Like McLaughlin and Ward, very few DNA testers are successful in locating long-lost siblings or biological parents.
Given that they had been constantly circling each other, McLaughlin mused to People, “Perhaps we did notice each other. We might have even been seated at the same ice cream shop. No one knows.
The sisters were finally able to meet up a few months after learning of one another’s existence so they could see one another in person. Ward was always aware that she had been adopted, and she hired MyHeritage for the DNA test to find out more about her ethnic background and perhaps track down her real parents. She never considered the possibility of having a sibling. The Mirror claims that Ward was the one to start the reunion after discovering a familial connection with a maternal relative who sent her to McLaughlin, who later underwent a DNA test.
To meet McLaughlin and her family for the first time, Ward and her husband went from the UK to Charlotte, North Carolina, in June. The sisters had a great time on their trip to North Carolina’s Nags Head Beach. It’s incredible that these two managed to connect despite so many close calls. They may now begin creating new memories together.