Line Frances Edøy, 30, a MyHeritage user from Norway, grew up without knowing who her father was. In 2019, she saw an advertisement for MyHeritage DNA kits and figured it couldn’t hurt to try it. While she hit a dead end at first, a new DNA match eventually led her to reunite with her father!
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When Line took the test and received her results, she found many relatives she knew about from her mother’s side among her DNA Matches, but there were also many from another family she’d never heard of. However, they were too distant to figure out how they were related to her. Line recruited the help of a friend who had some experience with genealogy, and they managed to identify someone who could be her great-grandfather. They managed to narrow the list of his descendants who could potentially be Line’s father to 5–6 people, but were not able to get any further.
Line as a young child
Fast forward to November 2022: Line suddenly received a message from a stranger who had just received his MyHeritage DNA results and wanted to know how they were related.
Karl Johan was not expecting to find anything special when he took a DNA test. Imagine his surprise when he received a close DNA match with a 30-year-old woman from Tustna he’d never heard of! With around 25% shared DNA, they could be uncle and niece or half-siblings. Karl found it extremely unlikely that his dad fathered another child, so he thought Line’s father must be one of his brothers.
And that’s how Stein Steiro Sitter, 48, received a phone call with the odd question that changed his life: “Were you at a party near Kristiansund in the summer of 1991?”
No room for doubt
Stein was born in Moss, but was raised in various youth homes in Oslo. In the summer of 1991, when he was 17, he reconnected with his father and the two worked together on a cargo boat transporting sand. As luck would have it, he was in Kristiansund in time for a village party, where he met an attractive woman who was older than him. He stayed in Kristiansund for half a year, never knowing that that encounter resulted in a pregnancy.
Stein received the news that he had another daughter with joy and pleasure. Karl Johan bought him a DNA kit so they could confirm the relationship, and the results left no room for doubt.
Stein and Line share 49.8% of their DNA
At this point, Line could wait no longer. She hopped on a flight to Oslo the very next day. It was a nerve-wracking trip: “I was physically unwell, quite simply,” Line told Norwegian news outlet Dagbladet in an interview. “I had spoken to him a few days before the test confirmed paternity. But when everything became a reality, I felt sick to my stomach and nervous.”
Line and Stein at the airport
Welcome to the family
Fortunately, the first meeting went better than she could have imagined. Line says her new family welcomed her with open arms: “It was more than I had hoped for,” she told Dagbladet. “I had no expectations. I just wanted to know who my father was, so I had a picture to look at.”
“They have their lives, and I have mine,” she went on. “I thought this could go either way. Now I am old enough that even if he is my father, he won’t be my ‘dad.’ That’s something that must be built up from a young age.”
“My father and I never had a father-son relationship until I was quite old,” Stein told Dagbladet. “I will never be the father who teaches her, but rather the link that she was missing in her life.” He describes the family as very “huggy,” and as Line is not a very “huggy” person, that’s something she’ll have to get used to.
Line has gained not only a father, but a stepmother, a little sister, a grandmother, and aunts, uncles, and cousins. Stein has gained not only a daughter, but a 10-year-old granddaughter.
“It could be a chance for her to get to know her grandfather,” Line told Dagbladet.
Stein sees similarities between himself and Line, as well as between her and his other four children.
“Both of us are sarcastic and have the same gallows humor,” he told Dagbladet.
Line used to be the only person in her family with green eyes. Now she knows where they came from.
Stein and Line both have green eyes
“If not for MyHeritage, we would never have found each other,” Stein told Dagbladet. “No one on her side knew that her mother and I had met. The only one who knew was my father, and he is deceased.”
Line is planning to visit him again at the end of March for a week, this time bringing her daughter. They’re all very much looking forward to it.
If you’ve also made a life-changing discovery with MyHeritage, we’d love to hear about it! Please send it to us via this form, or email us at stories@myheritage.com.
The post She Found Her Father After 30 Years. He Had No Idea She Existed appeared first on MyHeritage Blog.
Source: My Heritage
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