Cindy Cline had to live the majority of her life with the burden of never knowing where she came from.
“In the back of your mind, you’re always like, who do I really look like?” Cline told FOX8.
According to the American Adoption Congress, “72 percent of adopted adolescents wanted to know why they were adopted, 65 percent wanted to meet their birth parents, and 94 percent wanted to know which birth parent they looked like.”
Despite her desire to know her birth parents, Cline knew very little about them. All Cline knew was that she was adopted when she was 18-months-old and that her mom was from North Carolina.
Meanwhile, Chad Tucker’s family always pondered what happened to his great aunt’s daughter who had been given up for adoption.
“All we knew was that her name was Cynthia Ann and she was born in June of 1959 and she was given to a family in South Carolina,” Tucker said.
Cline’s biological mother, Christine Speer, would never reveal anything further than that.
Tucker wasn’t specifically searching for Cline when he took a DNA test for fun, but he found her nonetheless.
“I immediately called my mom and was like I think I found your cousin,” he said.
He was first alerted by an email from Cline’s daughter.
“And immediately at the top, was this woman who lived in South Carolina,” Tucker said. “And I thought, ‘Do I have any family…ohhhh.’”
Eventually, they started speaking on the phone and comparing family notes.
“She sounded just like my Aunt Christine so I knew immediately this was her,” Tucker said.
Cline was also using the DNA match service to find her family, but she had no idea that she had a sister named Angela Kay Clark or that Clark had been searching for her.
“She had been looking for her sister for years and had been running into dead ends. And this DNA test opened up all those questions,” Tucker said.
Clark said she was overwhelmed with emotion when she learned that she had finally found her sister.
“I started crying, panicking. ‘Is this real?’” Clark told FOX8. “’Do I have a sister?’ It was unbelievable.”
Eventually, the two sisters had arranged a meeting, but Cline almost got cold feet.
“I get out of the car at the hotel and I was telling my daughters, ‘I can’t do this,’” Cline said. “I’m like, ‘I’m not doing this.’”
She was sure glad she did because the two women are now inseparable.
They even have matching necklaces that say “Big Sis” and “Little Sis.”
“Next day after I found out I had a sister, I went out and bought them,” Clark said.
The meeting between the two women, which was 54 years in the making, was videotaped and quite the emotional reunion. The two sisters basically just held each other and cried. And their cries kind of sound alike too.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, I found my family,'” Cline said.
During their visit, Cline got to meet more of her family members and even see the home where her mother was raised and where she was laid to rest in 2012. Tucker was pleased that he was able to reunite Cline and Clark.
“There’s nothing like family,” Tucker said.
Check out the sisters’ tearful meeting in the video below!
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