At Upworthy, we are always looking for ways to make you feel better, and this particular story was simply too good for us to keep to ourselves.
Imagine going through your entire life without ever learning that you had a sister somewhere else in the world.That was the very situation that Diane Ward and Mary McLaughlin found themselves in.
Both ladies were adopted as infants and were born three years apart from one another; nevertheless, neither of them realized the other existed until they submitted their DNA to MyHeritage for testing.
It had been 56 years before they had any knowledge of one another.
McLaughlin and Ward spent their childhoods traveling to the other person’s city to visit their adoptive relatives without ever realizing that they were related.
McLaughlin had family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but he resided in Detroit, Michigan. Occasionally, he would travel there to see them.
Ward was a resident of Pittsburgh, although he frequently traveled to Detroit to see his relatives.
It seemed as if fate was eagerly awaiting the opportunity to bring them into contact with one another. And it gets weirder.
Both of these sisters spent some of their childhoods in Michigan, where, curiously enough, they lived only a few blocks apart from one another
McLaughlin spent some of their childhood with their biological mother, but after being abandoned by their mother and put in the care of the babysitter for an extended period of time, the babysitter and her husband were appointed as McLaughlin’s legal guardians.
According to People, McLaughlin’s mother became a ‘peripheral figure’ during their time together.
According to what McLaughlin shared with the Mirror, she was never officially adopted because her biological mother refused to give up her parental rights.
McLaughlin was 26 years old when their mother tragically passed away from breast cancer; this was a long time before the two sisters were connected through DNA testing.
According to what Ward told People, ‘We were basically just crossing back and forth throughout the majority of our childhood.’
It appears that both individuals went to the same bakery, but they never actually met. After then, Ward said, ‘It’s just strange. Creepy odd. Simply because we were always moving about in the same direction.’
After one of the sisters learned that the other existed, it took a few months before the two were able to physically confront one another and meet for the first time.
Ward was aware of her adoption from the very beginning and used the DNA tests provided by MyHeritage to discover more about her ethnic ancestry and maybe locate her original parents.
It had never occurred to her that she might have a brother or sister. According to the Mirror, Ward is the one who started the reunion after getting a familial match with a maternal cousin who pointed her in the direction of McLaughlin, who then took a DNA test. McLaughlin was the one who initiated the test himself.
In the month of June, Ward and her husband traveled all the way from the United Kingdom to Charlotte, North Carolina, in the United States, in order to meet McLaughlin and the rest of McLaughlin’s family for the first time.
The trip to Nags Head Beach in North Carolina was a lot of fun for the sisters when they were on vacation there.
It’s remarkable that these two were finally able to communicate with one another after missing so many opportunities to do so in the past. Now that they are together, the two of them can start making new memories together.