My Mom Discovered Someone She’s Known for Decades Is Her Sister (Exclusive)

Pamela Chelin, an award-winning journalist, is a reporter-researcher at PEOPLE — this is her mother’s story about the transformative power of finding family later in life.

After my father Verne died in September 2013 at the age of 86, I was leafing through old family photo albums at my parents’ house in Toronto. Beyond the weight of my own grief, I couldn’t begin to fathom my mom Elaine’s sorrow. In a span of just five months, she had buried her own father and her husband — and all following the death of her mother barely two years earlier. I told my mom that I marveled at her resilience as an only child but felt sad she lacked siblings to lean on during painful times.

That’s when my mom revealed a secret she had kept hidden for decades: she had two half-sisters, whose names she didn’t know and who were completely unaware of her existence. Then she shared that years ago, she met her birth mother, Ann Rodney (née Levy), who had since died.

Stunned, I asked my mom to elaborate. She shared that out of love and respect for her adoptive parents, who had never offered details about her birth parents, she had refrained from asking them for more information. Growing up, however, she was curious about the life she might have had and her birth mother’s physical appearance. She had also longed for the companionship of siblings. At 18, when she accidentally stumbled upon her adoption papers and saw her birth mother’s name, she kept the discovery to herself.

Yet in my mom’s mid-thirties, when my brother Stuart was 12 and I was 6, she felt an overwhelming urge to connect with Ann. Nervous about getting in touch directly, she enlisted a parent-finder organization to help. To my mom’s relief, Ann was eager to meet.

On the day of their reunion, my mom wore her nicest clothes, hoping to make her best impression. With her heart racing, she approached Ann, who was seated on a bench at a local park, their designated meeting spot. Ann greeted my mom warmly, noting her beauty and striking resemblance to her biological father, a soldier who was on leave during WWI with whom she had enjoyed a brief love affair. In the aftermath of their romance, Ann discovered that she was pregnant, and felt compelled to place my mom up for adoption.

Ann expressed that she had always hoped my mom had been raised in a loving family, and told her that she was named after a close friend. What’s more, Ann revealed that she had her own husband as well as two daughters who are unaware of my mom. As they parted, Ann said she welcomed staying in touch but wouldn’t intrude upon my mom’s life uninvited. However, that was the last time they would connect. Out of loyalty to her adoptive parents, my mom didn’t maintain a relationship with Ann. 

Over the years my mom wondered about her half-sisters but never pursued it. Sharing her history with me, however, brought it to a tipping point. It was then that she went to a local library to locate Ann’s 2004 obituary, which listed her daughters’ names: Sherry Clodman and Debby Edberg. Though my mom contemplated reaching out to them right then, she decided against it, afraid of disrupting their lives.

In 2021, however, my brother Stuart’s oldest son, Ben, then 15, matched on 23&Me with Sherry, learning she was his great aunt.

As Sherry’s profile noted that she was searching for a sibling on her father’s side, my mom figured she might be receptive to a sibling on her mother’s side too. She promptly called Sherry, delivering a bombshell introduction: “This might be the most unusual and surprising phone call you’ve ever had. In May of 1942, your mother had a baby girl, and I’m that baby.”

Sherry, who was celebrating her 68th birthday at the time, was floored — and wanted to meet as soon as possible.

Days later, at a local restaurant, they were initially struck by their stark physical differences. Sherry, with her blond hair and green eyes, stood six feet tall, towering above my petite, brown-eyed mom who, Sherry observed, inherited Ann’s dark brown hair. As they conversed, Sherry noted more similarities between my mom and Ann: their bold laughs, their no-nonsense approach to life, and their kindness, warmth and authenticity.

Soon after, my mom met Debby, who also noticed commonalities between Ann and my mom, which made Debby feel like she’d always known her. 

A year later, my brother and I surprised our mom with a weekend visit to Toronto for her 80th birthday. Sherry and Debby joined the three of us at a diner for Sunday brunch.

Over coffee, scrambled eggs and toast, I absorbed as much as I could about my aunts and Ann, who, I learned, had worked in women’s fashion, possessed a cheerful, upbeat demeanor and loved to entertain guests at her home.

Staring at a photo of her that was saved to Sherry’s cell phone, I was struck by how surreal it felt to be looking at an image of my biological grandmother — and sitting with my aunts who were unbeknownst to me for most of my life.

My Extraordinary Family is PEOPLE’s new series that explores fascinating families in all their forms. If you have a sweet story the world needs to know, send the details to love@people.com.

As if the story wasn’t remarkable enough, last year brought a new and shocking twist.

Sherry was identified on 23andMe as a great aunt to a young woman with the surname Greenglass, which prompted my mom to check her own ancestry profile online. Seeing the same connection, she called her longtime acquaintance, Carol Greenglass, who was also adopted, to ask if she might know her.

To my mom’s astonishment, Carol said the young woman is her granddaughter. “Oh my god! If she’s your granddaughter, and Sherry and I are her great aunts, you and I must be sisters!” my mom exclaimed. “You’ve got to do a DNA test as soon as possible!” 

When genetic testing revealed that Carol is also Ann’s daughter, she and my mom were completely gobsmacked. Not only had they known each other since they were young girls at summer camp, but as adults they had worked at the same real estate agency. They’d lived parallel lives for almost 75 years without knowing they were half-sisters. 

Following this fascinating development, my mom arranged for all four sisters to gather at Sherry’s house, where their innate bond was immediately apparent. Since then, they have all socialized together regularly and my aunts are unanimously thrilled about their newfound sisterhood.

“It feels easy and natural. We’re all so enormously different and yet we all click. I just wish it had happened sooner,” Sherry, 71, shares with me.

Trusting fate’s trajectory, however, Debby, 73, says, “It doesn’t matter how long it took, something put us together and it was meant to be. I believe things happen for a reason. It feels like we’ve been together forever, and we’re so excited we have each other.”

“The whole thing is really surreal but fabulous,” Carol agrees. “Imagine that at 85 years old I suddenly have three sisters. It is absolutely wonderful.”

For my mom, now 82, finding her sisters late in life has been transformative, offering a sense of completeness. “It had always felt like I came from nowhere,” she tells me, “but now, I feel like I have a real-life history.”

Yet she remains incredulous about the enormity of it all. “I’m still processing it. It’s such an extraordinary story. I get goosebumps every time I tell it,” my mom says. “Everyone always says it should be a movie.”