This is a truly heartwarming story.
As a way to find his father, a man in Hawaii took an Ancestry.com DNA test. He soon discovered he shared the same birth mother as someone else using the site: his best friend of 60 years.
Now in their 60s, Walter Macfarlane and Alan Robinson of Oahu recently learned that they are half-brothers. The men, both born and raised in Hawaii, are 15 months apart in age and used to play football together in high school. Macfarlane says that he and Robinson have been playing cribbage together all their lives.
Macfarlane never knew his father, and Robinson was adopted.
With the help of his family, Macfarlane searched for answers over the years through the internet and social media with no luck so they turned to family DNA matching websites.
“So then we started digging into all the matches he started getting,” Cindy Macfarlane-Flores, Macfarlane’s daughter, explained.
At the top of the list of DNA matches was the username Robi737.
The results showed Macfarlane and robi737 had several matches in their DNA including identical X chromosomes.
Here’s where Robinson comes in.
“As a nickname everybody called him Robi and he flew 737s for Aloha Airlines, he was a pilot,” Macfarlane-Flores says.
It turns out Robinson had also used Ancestry.com to find answers about his family.
After a few phone calls back and forth, the men learned they shared the same birth mother.
“It was a shock,” Macfarlane said.
“Yea it was shock, definitely and then we thought about it and compared forearms,” Robinson said.
“Yea hairy arms, that did it!” Macfarlane exclaimed.
The two revealed the discovery to friends and family Saturday night.
With the recent discovery, the siblings now plan to travel together for their retirement.
screenshot via KHON