Texas Woman Meets Her Birth Family 36 Years After Being Adopted

GRAND PRAIRIE, TX — Half-black and half-Filipino is how a young Natosha Brown described herself. From age 6, she knew she was born in the Philippines and adopted by an American family. At age 36, she met her birth father.

Brown, who lives in Grand Prairie, never set out to find her biological family. When she first signed up for 23andMe, a genetic testing service, she was trying to find out why one of her two teenage daughters was 'sickly.'

"She has quite a few health issues," she said. "Not anything serious, but asthma, allergies." Brown has always asked herself what medical problems she had passed on to the 14-year-old girl. She said mothers always want to have the answers — especially when it comes to a child's health. But, since she didn't know her biological family, she had none.

On her search for answers, Brown turned to the DNA service she said she heard about while watching Ryan Seacrest on TV.

So she signed up for 23andMe, spit in a tube and mailed it off. Luckily, the researchers at 23andMe found nothing in Brown's DNA that suggested she gave her daughter bad genes. What they found, however, impacted Brown more than she could have known was possible.

She was adopted from the Philippines by an African American family when she was 4 months old — that much she knew. What she did not know is that her biological dad lives in California, and that he thought she still lived in the Philippines. Nor did she know she has four biological sisters.

But she wasn't certain, at least early on, that she was ready to know about her birth family.

"My initial reaction was ‘I don’t know if I want to go down this road, honestly,’" she told Patch. "When I saw I had a high percentage on a relative, I was like, 'ugh , do you want to do this?' I was already really apprehensive. I was fine [before] — I didn’t go into 23andMe to find relatives at all."

But curiosity overcame Brown, and with the click of a button, she set in motion an exciting new chapter of her life.

It began when a cousin she didn't know reached out to her with a simple message: "I know who your daddy is." She didn't believe him at first. She said her cousin looked to be an Asian-Caucasian mixture and that she thought it was more likely the man was related to her Filipino mother than her African American father.

But it was true, and he told her how to contact William Woolery, her birth father. The talked for a while and learned about each other, and Woolery made the trip to North Texas to meet Brown and her family.

Brown, her husband and her daughters got to know Wollery, but 23andMe had bigger plans for the recently-connected family. The company flew Brown to New York City for Thanksgiving where she met her four sisters.

"I don’t know if they know how much we appreciate just having that time [in New York City]. It was amazing just to soak them in and get to know them and to see how alike we are," she said. "That’s what I’ve been amazed with."

Her husband and daughters were excited for her too, she said.

"My family, they loved it. Everybody loved this for me, and I loved this for the Woolerys. They had been looking for me for so long — 36 years. I loved this for them."

And Brown was right all along — at least mostly. She is, in fact, black and Filipino. But she learned she is also 19 percent Irish. But that information alone doesn't answer the questions she has about her mother — questions to which she isn't sure she is ready to know the answers.

"My husband and my daughters have been wanting this for me. My daughters, especially my oldest daughter and husband, have been wanting to go the Philippines. I was over off in the corner like ‘go ahead.’"

As for Woolery, Brown said she talks to him multiple times a day.

"He’s like my new best friend," she said. "He absolutely is."

Lead image via 23andMe, Youtube