A woman in Michigan reunited with her biological father, whom she hadn’t seen in 25 years.
Jordyn O’Neil was born in Michigan and then grew up in Athens, Alabama with her grandparents after her mom abandoned her.
“My mother had taken me to Texas when I was around eight months old and so when I was about a year old, she took me to my grandmother’s in Alabama, dropped me off and said, ‘I’m done being a parent. Here she is.’ So that’s when my grandmother and her husband went through full adoption with me,” O’Neil said.
O’Neil’s mom unfortunately passed away when she was still a child. So she grew up without truly knowing either of her parents. It was not until her grandmother died in 2020, that, she decided to look up and search for her biological dad.
“After she passed away, I started looking for family members or anybody that would want to know that she had passed,” O’Neil said. “She was everything to me and so after losing her, [it] was really hard. So, I wanted to know who else I had left, as far as my father and maybe his side of the family, thinking, I could lean on them for support and just having them back in my life.”
Initially, O’Neil’s search for her dad met with dead ends, since she had no prior information on him. “You can’t really find someone, if you don’t know who you are looking for”, she explained.
But then, her boyfriend encouraged her to get an Ancestry DNA kit that led her to her great-aunt. She contacted her great-aunt Pam, who finally shared her biological father’s name with her and gave her a couple of old photos of her parents.
O’Neil then shared the information and the photos in local Michigan Facebook groups, and in one group, “Downriver and Friends,”. The post went viral, and many people knew her father, Brian Ahern. She then received messages with his phone number, his address, and some even went to knocked on his door to tell him about the post.
“I was shaking, like, I was nervous. I wanted to throw up. I had so many emotions going through my head like, ‘Oh, my God, this is finally it. Like, I have found him.’ And it was too late at night for me to reach out to him, but I called him the next morning,” O’Neil said.
Brian Ahern, 65, explained that he had also been looking for his daughter all these years. Praying that one day he will get to see her and would often talked about it with his friends. When he learned about her daughter who is searching for him, he got all the more excited.
O’Neil and Ahern talked over the phone first and then met in person recently after 25 years. Both said they knew they were each other’s family almost immediately.
The 65 year old is overwhelmed and at the same time is determined to make up for all the years he had missed out with her daughter by spending as much time as he possibly can and especially with his three month old grandson, Asher.
“Being able to pick up the phone and be like, ‘Hey, Dad,’ it’s surreal,” O’Neil said. “It leaves me speechless even still. I still just can’t believe it.”
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