Veteran Spends Lost Time With Daughter Whom He Wasn’t Aware Existed for 50 Years

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Reunions are indeed special, and this one is truly heartwarming.

A Vietnam veteran loved sitting on a deck chair at his home in Grass Valley, California, watching the deers. He thought he’d never have any children of his own, till he received a life-changing phone call from a woman from Florida in October 2017.

Olivia Robles was born in the Philippines in 1967. She moved to the United States when she was 6 years old. At age 10, she learned that the man she thought was her dad wasn’t her birth father.

From then on, she embarked upon a lifelong search to find her biological father.

“I always knew I had a dad out there somewhere,” Robles, of Valrico, Florida, told WTSP.

Years passed, and then decades. Robles, a mother of three, lived her first 50 years without knowing who her birth father was, until one day in September 2017, when she received a surprise from Ancestry.com.

Unexpectedly, the DNA sample she had once submitted matched that of a woman named Diana Barnes, whom she had never met but turned out to be her second cousin.

Robles got in touch with Diana, who provided her clues on who her biological father might be.

Diana told Robles that her then-78-year-old father, Gary Dean Barnes, was a Vietnam war veteran—and that he had visited the Philippines in 1966 while serving with the U.S. Navy during the war.

When Robles saw the photo of Barnes, she realized a striking resemblance to one of her own sons. “He has to be my father,” Robles thought, The Union reported.

In early October that year, Robles picked up the phone and gave Barnes a call. “Would you be willing to do a DNA test?” Robles asked Barnes, according to CBS Sacramento. Barnes replied, “Sure!”

As promised, Barnes submitted his own DNA sample on Nov. 4, 2017, and as expected, the result confirmed Barnes to be Robles’s biological father.

“I was absolutely thrilled and I still am. I am overwhelmed,” Barnes told Fox 13.

“I remember vowing not to have children,” Barnes said. He never imagined he’d end up having a daughter, three grandsons, and a great-grandson.

Barnes recalled traveling to the Philippines to relax when he was off duty from the war. “I went out with her mother and then when they shipped me out the final time back to Vietnam, we lost touch,” he told Fox 6.

He never knew she was pregnant.

Finally, in late November that year, Robles flew from Florida to Reno-Tahoe International Airport in Nevada to meet her biological father, whom she'd longed to meet for the last 40 years.

Barnes and his wife, Caryl, were there waiting for her. Seeing her birth father after so many years was “truly a miracle.”

“It just all fell together, like that missing piece of the puzzle all my life,” Robles said, as reported by The Union.

Barnes feels there’s a reason for him to live this long. “He said it’s because of me,” Robles told ABC Action News.

“My life is complete,” Barnes said.

Since the heartwarming reunion, the father-daughter duo has been spending time to recover all the lost years. In October 2018, Robles celebrated her birthday for the first time with her dad and referred to the moment as “priceless.”

In December 2018, Robles shared her experience on Ancestry.com, saying, “Miracles do happen! I can attest to that after finding my biological father thanks to Ancestry.com that resulted in a DNA match with my second cousin Diana Barnes.”

She further added: “This last year has been amazing; we are truly blessed to have found one another! We have been spending a lot of time together to make up for all the years of being apart. We love sharing our story as an inspiration to others that miracles can happen—don’t give up on your dreams!”

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