You can take the sister out of the other’s life, but you can’t prevent bizarrely parallel events from occurring to them both.
Victoria Voorhees, 27, grew up not knowing much about her genealogy beyond that she was adopted and Hispanic. So, in 2019, she used a 23andMe DNA home test kit in hopes of finding out more about her heritage.
What she found out shook her world.
“I was just in shock,” said Voorhees, who, on the evening of February 18, learned through the ancestry site that she had a sibling, South West News Service (SWNS) reported.
“I saw the picture of my sister, Alyss, and I mean it looked like me! I was like, ‘Is that me? That’s so weird!’ ” said Voorhees, who was adopted when she was 2 months old and had believed she had no blood relatives. “I was just staring at it, it didn’t register.”
The Chicago resident and residential nurse rushed home from work to tell the news to her adopted parents, who had only ever revealed to her that she was born in Phoenix, Arizona, and the date of her birth.
Her father initially laughed at the announcement while her mom remained mum, before they revealed that they had known all along Voorhees had a sister, and they were still in contact with her birth mother.
“I felt like I was in a movie or something — it was just so dramatic!” said Voorhees, who had always wanted an older sister.
It turned out her sister, 28-year-old Maine resident Alyss Ravae, had been searching for Voorhees for years.
“My mum told me when I was 9 that I had a biological sister that came from both my same parents, and so I’ve always tried to look for her,” said Ravae. “I’ve tried for so long to find her through social media.”
The pair got to talking and realized that, in addition to looking nearly identical, they had astoundingly similar interests: Both love Stephen King, Halloween, hiking trails, sell pet portraits online, have cats and ankle tattoos of bats.
“It’s so weird, all these strange coincidences happened. We live very parallel lives, even though we were given very different situations,” reflected Ravae.
The siblings are now planning to reunite in person in Chicago
