I Took a DNA Test to Find Long-Lost Relatives in America. I Found a Sister Instead

I have always known I had relatives in America. Two of my great-grandmother’s brothers emigrated from Sweden to the United States in the early 1900s, and that branch of the family had always felt just out of reach. When a relative recently managed to make some contact with the American side, I became keen to try for myself. So in the autumn of 2025, I ordered a DNA test from MyHeritage and sent in my sample, expecting to find a name from that missing branch — a cousin, perhaps, or a grandchild of those two brothers.

I was not prepared for what I found instead.

An unexpected DNA Match

The results arrived in early November. It was a Sunday morning when the email came from MyHeritage. The first thing it showed me was my ethnicity breakdown: 37% Balkan.

My whole life, based on everything my mother had told me, I had believed my father was Danish. I had carried that without question — until this number on a screen made me begin to wonder.

But that was only the beginning. When I went further and looked at my DNA Matches, the very first result at the top of the list was: half-sister.

A half-sister DNA Match

Then my heart started racing. I became so nervous and worked up that I couldn’t think quite clearly.

Somewhere out there was a woman who shared a father with me. A father I had never known.

“Can we call?”

I sent her a message through MyHeritage. Her reply came quickly: Can we call? And so we did.

Her name is Suzanna — she goes by Sanna — and she lives just a few hours away in Beddingestrand, in Skåne. She took a DNA test 3 years earlier, a birthday gift from her daughter. She hadn’t expected this either.

She told me that when she saw the subject line of my message — Hello, my name is Eva and we’re half-sisters — she was in complete shock. And then she told me something remarkable. When she was 24, she visited a medium who told her she had a sister. She hadn’t believed it at the time. The medium had said the sister would “knock on her door” when she was older.

40 years later, I knocked.

The same village, the same streets

We met for the first time on December 13, 2025, and it clicked instantly.

Eva and Sanna meeting for the first time

We are so incredibly alike — in the way we think, in our humor, in our spontaneity.

Then we began comparing notes, and the coincidences kept coming.

Sanna had grown up spending 2–3 months every summer in Milna, a small village on the island of Brač in Croatia. Her parents had owned a house there for years. I had vacationed in Milna 5 or 6 times. We looked at each other and did the math. We had almost certainly been in that village at the same time, walking the same streets, perhaps passing each other without a second glance. It turns out our father — a man from Split, now 82 — had owned a home there. He had been there all along.

Childhood photos of Sanna (left) and Eva (right)

Putting it together

Sanna had briefly worried about what this discovery might mean for her family’s history. Her father had been a sailor, often away. But her mother was able to put her mind at rest: our father and my mother had been together a full year before he ever met Sanna’s mother.

And then we found one more detail. We were comparing notes about ourselves and realized we wore the exact same brand and model of glasses. Then Sanna asked my full name.

Marie Eva.

Her full name is Marie Suzanna.

Out of all the names in the world, somehow we were both given Marie. As Sanna put it: “It felt like one more quiet thread connecting us, long before we ever knew each other. The same middle name. The same glasses. So many small things that somehow mirror each other. It’s in those little details that this story feels even more extraordinary.”

A reunion, and a first meeting

On April 24, 2026, I met my father for the first time.

The same weekend, Sanna and I marked what we had found in the most permanent way we could think of: matching tattoos.

Eva and Sanna with their new tattoos

She has “little sis” on her arm. I have “big sis” on mine. When we stand side by side, they connect.

The connecting tattoos

We also started a joint Instagram account to share our story and our journey together: @dna_sisterhood.

The grandmother who got to know

I did find those American relatives, too. I am now in contact with Jane Thompson, the grandchild of one of my great-grandmother’s brothers, the very branch I had set out to find. My grandmother, who will turn 100 in August, was deeply moved when I showed her photographs of the American family. That felt like something restored.

It’s a wonderful story, and it definitely isn’t over yet.

Many thanks to Eva and Sanna for sharing their beautiful story with us. If you’ve also made an incredible discovery with MyHeritage, we’d love to hear about it. Please send it to us via this form or email us at stories@myheritage.com.