Marian Griffin, 80, always thought there was something missing in her life, she told ABC News. It turned out that missing something was an older brother she didn't even know existed, and whose family had been trying to find her for decades.
Griffin and her older brother, 81-year-old Donald Hefke, finally found each other after being separated shortly after birth in 1946 when they were placed in foster care, Griffin told ABC News on Wednesday.
"I still can't believe he found me," Griffin said. "It only took us 80 years."
Before their separation, the two siblings -- and another older brother named Ernest, who was born deaf and has since died -- were living in Chicago with their birth parents. Hefke was born in 1944 and Griffin arrived the following year, Hefke's daughter, Denise Baker, told ABC News on Wednesday.
But after their mother -- who had been struggling with post traumatic stress disorder -- was placed in a mental institution shortly after Griffin's birth, their father was not able to take care of the children on his own. They were placed in foster care -- with Griffin only being eight months old and Hefke barely over a year old, Baker said.
Griffin was adopted by a Lutheran minister and his family, while Hefke remained with a foster family until he was commissioned into the U.S. Air Force, Baker said. Hefke, who was determined to learn more about his biological family, reached out to the foster care agency in 1963 and they replied with "a little bit of information," including that he had a sister named Marian, Baker said.
She shared with ABC News a letter the foster care agency sent Hekfe confirming details about his family.
Hefke attempted to reach out to Griffin's adopted parents, but they told him to "stop bothering us" and hid those requests for contact from Griffin, even though she was already 18 years old and out of high school, according to Griffin. If she had known she had a brother out there, she "would have been looking for him and the two of us would have been together, believe me," she said.
"My parents never told me at all about Donald looking for me," Griffin said. "Our kids could have grown up together, instead we were separated because my parents would not tell me that my brother wrote to me and was looking for me."
Baker, Hefke's daughter, picked up the investigative efforts once she was an adult and spent more than two decades looking through paperwork, online research and ancestry websites.
It wasn't until she discovered Griffin's son had completed DNA testing and uploaded it to Ancestry and she saw "there was a connection there." She then contacted the son, who passed along her information to Griffin in July 2024.
"I thought it was a scam," Griffin said when she first heard about Baker claiming to be the daughter of her long-lost brother.
After several conversations with Baker, reality began to sink in for Griffin and she was able to speak to her older brother for the very first time.
"He was so happy. He kept saying my name again and again, 'Marian, I found you, I found you.' It's like something out of a book," Griffin told ABC News.
While they have celebrated their reunion through telephone calls, the two still haven't met in person, since Hefke -- who is in poor health -- lives in Florida and Griffin resides in California. But Baker, Hefke's daughter, was able to travel to California to meet her aunt in June.
"I was like, 'Yep you look just like my dad, no denying you guys are siblings.' Even though they didn't spend time together at all, but [she] looked and talked and acted like my dad," Baker said.
Griffin plans to fly to Florida to physically reunite with her brother once she obtains the money to do so, and in the meantime they talk on the phone once a month.
"We're going to walk down with our canes together. We're just going to have to have a lot of coffee, we've got 80 years to catch up on," Griffin said.
After this reunion that was eight decades in the making, Griffin has one piece of advice: "Don't give up on each other."
"We were looking for each other for 80 years. We found each other," she said.
