For 80 years, Marian Griffin felt like something was missing.
She never could’ve guessed that “something” was an older brother she didn’t even know existed.
“I still can’t believe he found me,” Griffin, 80, told ABC News. “It only took us 80 years.”
Griffin and her brother, 81-year-old Donald Hefke, were separated shortly after birth in 1946 when their mother, suffering from PTSD, was institutionalized. Their father couldn’t care for the children alone, so they were placed in foster care. Marian was just eight months old; Donald, barely over a year.
Donald was raised by a foster family and later commissioned into the U.S. Air Force. Marian was adopted by a Lutheran minister.
But Donald never stopped wondering about his biological family. In 1963, he reached out to the foster care agency and learned he had a sister named Marian. He wrote to her adoptive parents, but they never told her.
“My parents never told me at all about Donald looking for me,” Griffin said. “Our kids could have grown up together… instead we were separated because my parents would not tell me that my brother wrote to me and was looking for me.”
The search didn’t end there. Donald’s daughter, Denise Baker, took the reins. For more than 20 years, she scoured documents, websites, and DNA records. Finally, in July 2024, she made a breakthrough: Marian’s son had uploaded his DNA to Ancestry.com, and the match lit up.
“I thought it was a scam,” Griffin admitted when she got the call from Denise.
But after a few phone calls and a lot of tears, it became beautifully real.
“He was so happy. He kept saying my name again and again, ‘Marian, I found you, I found you.’ It’s like something out of a book,” she recalled.
While the siblings have yet to meet in person, Donald is in Florida and in poor health, and Marian is in California, they talk on the phone every month. Denise even flew to California to meet her newly found aunt in June.
“I was like, ‘Yep, you look just like my dad, no denying you guys are siblings,’” Denise said. “Even though they didn’t spend time together at all, she looked and talked and acted like my dad.”
Marian says she’s now saving up to visit Donald in Florida.
“We’re going to walk down with our canes together. We’re just going to have to have a lot of coffee, we’ve got 80 years to catch up on,” she said.
And her advice to the world?
“Don’t give up on each other,” Griffin said. “We were looking for each other for 80 years. We found each other.”
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