ancestry father daughter

Many people take DNA tests to discover their ethnic fabric. Sometimes, these tests provide much more than that. An Alabama dentist found this out when he got a message on Ancestry.com from a daughter he never knew he had.

Laura Barnes always knew she was adopted by her biological mother’s brother and his wife, so she already knew her birth mother. When she took the test, she wasn’t really looking for her father, but he immediately showed up in her results. She sent him a message not knowing whether she would get a reply, but one came within hours.

“WOW,” the message read. “Give me a minute. I had no idea.”

It didn’t take John Bennett long to realize that Laura was his daughter. He only briefly knew her biological mother and was never aware they had a child. Another coincidence was that Laura, who was raised in Louisiana, is a student at the University of Alabama and lives just 2.3 miles from his home.

They met for coffee just two days later wondering if there would be a connection. Turns out, the pair hit it off immediately.

“I believe in a higher power, and I believe that’s what’s brought us together,” Bennett told the Tuscaloosa News. “I do. I believe God brought us together. We were supposed to meet.”

They claim to finish each other sentences. The dentist also looked at his daughter’s teeth to see if she had the same anomaly with a lower bicuspid that he and his son have. She did.

“I felt connected to her, even though I didn’t raise her,” the father said. “We finish each other’s sentences. We’re family, we can tell we are. It’s not something we’ve forced at all.”

Bennett laments missing out on Laura’s childhood but is grateful to her adopted family for raising her. Had he known about her existence, it is clear things would have been much different.

“I felt apologetic because I hadn’t participated in her life. I didn’t know she was alive, but I felt guilty for not participating,” he said. “I felt like I owed her adoptive parents an explanation and almost an apology because they had raised a child that was mine, but I had no knowledge of it.”

Laura said she begged her parents for a little brother a few years ago. She now realizes that God actually did answer that prayer as it was about the same time John’s son was born.

“The way we figured, that’s around the time Jackson was born,” Bennett said of his youngest son. “It just took me a while to find him,” Laura added.

Bennett said the only time he feels regret is when he sees a picture of Laura as a child. He wishes he could have hugged her then. But, these two are grateful for having found each other and remain optimistic about the future.

“We’ve had to embrace it. I think this is the way it was supposed to happen. There were 19 years that we didn’t have together, but we’ve got the next 19. That’s the gift. This is an amazing story, to us,” he said. “You talk about how you make your own story. God gave us this story, we just tell it. It’s something we’re going forward with and that we’re grateful for.”

Source: Tuscaloosa News

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