Do you have a best friend that you get along with so well, you almost wish they were your brother or sister? Well, there were two men from Texas named Walter Gordy and Mark Tolson. Now these two weren’t exactly BFFs. They were more like acquaintances after being introduced by a mutual friend. But they got along okay. In fact, they even exchanged numbers but had no idea they shared a bond that was stronger than anything until they took a DNA test. And that’s when their lives were changed forever!One day, Tolson went looking for his biological father using 23andMe, a biotechnology company that provides personalized reports on health, traits, and ancestry using a sample of a client’s blood. But the results left him quite shaken.
He figured he’d run into a distant relative like a fourth cousin, but he wasn’t expecting for Walter Gordy’s name to pop up. It turns out that Gordy had also used 23andme in 2014 because he had suffered from cancer and wanted to know if he might have other predisposed illnesses in his genes.
It turns out that both of their moms had used the same fertility clinic to conceive and also the same donor to get pregnant. But what’s even more shocking is that the mothers knew each other. They simply had no idea their boys were related.
Gordy recalled his mom dropping the phone on the table when he showed her a photo of Tolson’s mom and she said “‘Oh my God, that’s Wini and we sing in the choir together and I just saw her 20 minutes ago at church.’”
Gordy said, “I always wanted a sibling. I always wanted it and it never happened. With him, it was immediate love.” Once the news of their lineage set in, Tolson and Gordy were elated that they were brothers.
Even their moms went from choir buddies to family too. If it hadn’t been for Gordy’s lymphoma diagnosis and the lump on his neck, Tolson would not have known that he had a blood brother when he went to look through his results on the 23andme site.
Gordy and Tolson were invited to share their story with Dylan Dreyer and Sheinelle Jones on NBC’s Today Show and they brought their mothers along. Now this family has doubled in size and will undoubtedly serve as inspiration for others looking for lost family members.
