A Family Reunion 66 Years in the Making: Woman Reunited with Four Siblings She Never Met

Sylvia Kewer thought she was alone in the world.  Raised as an only child, she had no family. But all of that changed when Kewer, 66, found out she was one of five siblings. 

Her mother had four other children that Kewer never knew about. Her half-siblings, who were all raised separately except for brothers Curtis and Ralph Duff, had heard of her but believed she had died. However, Kewer's baby brother, Billy Lee Ray, wouldn't stop searching for her. 

"My baby brother never gave up looking for me," Kewer said during an interview with ABC News. "By the grace of God."

"I was just so happy to be by myself then to find out I have all these relatives," she said. "I finally know where I came from."

She was born Dorothy Mae Goode on Dec. 12, 1950, in Buchanan County, Virginia. When she was still a teen, her parents told her she was adopted at the age of 4. They didn't tell her a lot about her biological mother.

"All they could tell me about her was that she was not married," she said.

Fast forward several years later, she would have her own daughter she named Natalie Graves Tucker. 

Tucker, 46, was always curious about her mother's family tree and encouraged her to submit a DNA test on Ancestry.com.

"I always thought I was Hispanic," Kewer recalled.  

But when the test results came back, it revealed she was actually 72 percent European and 28 percent African.

There was also another surprise. The website said her DNA matched another person who had an "extremely high match" of being related to her. 

That person turned out to be William Keith Ray, the son of Kewer's baby brother, Billy Lee Ray. Curious about his family history, the younger Ray had submitted a DNA test for his 46th birthday last June. 

At first, he didn't believe the message he received. It said there was an "extremely high match" for a relative who had placed DNA on file with the website. 

Ray's father Billy Lee, thought the biological relative might be his long-lost sister. 

The pair connected with Tucker and they all began planning to meet.

Kewer and her daughter later found out she also had three other living older siblings -- Curtis and Ralph Duff along with Nancy Goode O'Donnell.

The elder Ray had been on the trail of his birth family for years. Ray was born in Honaker, Virginia, in 1953 with the name David Lee Goode.

His late adoptive parents never told him he was adopted. He discovered this several years later.

"I got nosy and I found some papers. I found my original birth certificate," Ray told ABC News, which gave his birth parents' names.

"From there, I started doing some research and ended up finding my grandparents and my biological mother," the counselor and detention officer said. "I got to know her."

Their mother died of a heart attack in 1982.

Ray also found his three known siblings back in the 1970s. Now, he wanted to get the entire family together for the first time.

"God bless Billy," O'Donnell, 69, said. "His persistence is one of the reasons why we got together -- because he never gave up."

All of Lambert's five children recently met for the first time in Abingdon, Virginia, along with other family members, who gathered to reminisce and to catch up. 

"I was happy. I was nervous. I was excited," Kewer recalled. "To meet all these family members that are all white and from the mountains, and they love me so much. I got so many hugs and so many kisses."

O'Donnell said that she couldn't stop hugging her siblings.

"I have felt an emptiness sort of and I wasn't quite sure what caused it or why it was there, but when we were together for the weekend there was no emptiness," the older sister said.

"When we first got together and had that first hug," O'Donnell continued, "it was like 'Wow!' That's a little piece that fit."

Ray, who called the weekend a "miracle," said the siblings plan to keep in touch.

It's welcome news for Kewer, who just settled into a new apartment.

"I honestly thought I was going to be living alone for the rest of my life and just be by myself and not know anything or anybody except Natalie...that's my world," Kewer said.

"Now I have a bigger world with four siblings," she told ABC News.

For more videos and photos of Kewer's family, visit her daughter's Facebook page.