Tuesday night, Jody Castle stood inside the Tampa International Airport holding a sign that read, “Found our siblings after 53 years!” as she anxiously waited.
Castle was greeted with hugs, tears, and a lot of emotions from her newly-found sisters.
The three sisters never knew about each other until they submitted their DNA through an Ancestry DNA kit. They were separated when they were adopted as children.
“Group hug!” Jody exclaimed as she hugged her sisters, Fran Whiddon and Jennifer Tomsovic at Tampa International Airport.
“There’s a lot of similarities, I guess if you want to call them coincidences. We found out, Jennifer and I actually went to the same college. We may have been there at the same time, but we never knew about each other,” Jody said.
Two of the sisters already met within recent months, and they worked together to track down their third.
One of the sisters is from Tampa, the others are from Alabama and Indiana.
“It’s like we have grown up for years, like, it’s just natural,” Jennifer Tomsovic said.
They learned they have a total of eight siblings, and plan to meet a brother who lives in Hawaii soon. They hope to track down the rest of their siblings as soon as possible.
“I hope we find the other four,” sister Fran Whiddon said in tears. “We know who our mother was, but she died in 1999. We were adopted from the same place.”
“We were born in Hammond, Lake County Indiana to Helen Wierzbicki Grauvogl from East Chicago, who passed away 20 years ago, and birth father Joseph Burba who passed away 28 years ago,” Jody said.
