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Sisters Separated for 47 Years Finally Meet Decades after Secret Was Kept from Them

By Jason Derr February 16, 2018 at 12:01pm

Parents often have to make tough choices when it comes to their kids. For some, the toughest choice is if they are in a place — financially, emotionally — to even raise another kid.

Often in these situations, a parent will choose to put a child up for adoption. This is a brave choice.

Often we talk about the bravery of the adoptive parents but we don’t often talk about the bravery of the birth mothers.

And we don’t talk about the siblings and others who were left behind, denied a chance at a relationship that would have otherwise been very important to their childhood.

Take Jennifer Braica and April Kreppel as an example. Separated at birth, the two sisters have spent almost 20 years looking for each other. “Mom had said that she couldn’t afford her, so she had to give her a good home,” Kreppel said.

It wasn’t until she was 19 years old that Kreppel even learned she had a sister. Braica was 27 when she learned she had a sister, but she’d known she was adopted since age 10.

For Braica, this is a journey of more than finding a sister, it’s about discovering something about herself.

“I always wanted to find my biological parents, not to replace my adoptive family, but out of curiosity, to see where my roots were,” said Braica, who lives in Las Vegas.

Since arriving in Florida where the two sisters met up at an airport, they have wasted no time connecting.

The two sisters have spent days together, discovering they even had some shared childhood experiences. “We had a childhood song that we both sang and never knew.

We sang it together cooking dinner,” Braica stated. “It’s just been amazing. This has been the best week of my life.”

This reconciliation is the beginning of what the sisters hope will be a lifetime together. They even hope to live near each other sometime in the future.

“I look at her and I feel like I’ve known her my entire life,” Braica told the station. “She’s beautiful and she’s so much more than I ever expected. And she will never get away from me again.”

The two sisters actually spent years living near each other, with both residing on Long Island. The sisters spent 20 years looking for each other and it wasn’t till using Ancestry.com that they found each other through a distant relative.

I know that somewhere out there in the readership, a birth mother is reading this right now. I want to tell you we all know how brave you are.

I hope the story of the sisters finding each other will inspire you to know the future is positive, open, and loving. Likewise to all the kids who were adopted looking for their birth families, please be inspired.

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