"And I thought, 'Well, that's kinda silly. Mine's gonna be exactly the same as hers."
Diane Marie Kubis of Seattle didn't think much of taking an Ancestry DNA test after her sister already did one, but she sent it off anyway. A few weeks later she heard back.
"The first thing I noticed is that it showed a 99 percent direct match to a mother-daughter relationship from a Diana Marie," said Kubis.
A flood of memories came rushing back to the time when she was 17 and pregnant; her Catholic parents made her give up her baby. After 50 years of being told the Catholic records couldn't be unsealed, a simple test blood test brought them together.
Last Monday, she sent an email to the Ancestry account:
Diana,
This will come as quite a shock to you as it did me when I had my DNA completed recently. You are my birth daughter who I had to give up for adoption April 22, 1967. I have missed you every day of my life all these years.
And she got a message back:
Dear Diane,
If you ARE in fact my birth mother, then I can tell you that I have been searching for you for 27 years, when I became pregnant with your first granddaughter.
Since then, more emails shared and more pictures of Diana and her daughters, who are now grown up. Diane then had to tell her adoptive daughter Aretha something she'd never told anyone.
"It was a very powerful moment," recalled Aretha. "I cried and she was crying, and it was very emotional."
And serendipitous. Diana was living in Hawaii and is moving to Seattle. Her flight arrives on Mother's Day, and both Aretha and Diane plan to be at the airport.
"I just think it's wonderful that I'm able to find her after all these years," said Diane.
The news of Diana's move is bittersweet. She needs medical treatment for a life-threatening disease and will undergo several operations in Seattle.
