The surprising call came in March 2020 to a suburban home in a quiet Lakewood community.

“I apologize if this is the wrong person...,” the woman’s voice on the other end started. As 71-year-old Yale Geftic listened, his eyes widened and he yelled for his wife, Nancy, to come to his side.

Geftic was for the first time hearing the voice of a sister he never knew he had. Then, she broke even bigger news to him: She was one of his six half-siblings scattered across the U.S., all of whom share the same mother. In all, 11 relatives were identified.

The voice on the other line, Florida resident Lucy Rodriguez, told him she and a sister she had grown up with, Pat Donnellan, had recently made the discoveries using DNA testing services 23andMe and Ancestry.com. (NJ Advance Media reviewed the matches on the websites, two of the siblings’ birth certificates and other birth records).

Born in Beth Israel Hospital 1949, Geftic was adopted at nine days old and grew up in Newark as an only child, though surrounded by 21 first cousins from his adoptive father’s side. His newly found sisters share similar origin stories: all were born in Beth Israel Hospital (except one), most were adopted to Jewish families and grew up in North Jersey.

Their birth mother, Virginia Helen DiNova, passed away in 2001, Rodriguez said. Rodriguez and Donnellan pieced together bits of her story over the years from different family members.

DiNova, who went by the nickname “Jean,” grew up in a strict, Catholic family in Albany, New York, and became pregnant at a young age. Her parents kicked her out of their house and sent her to a home for “wayward girls.” Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, she traveled to Newark to secretly give birth to children, and arranged underground adoptions. (On his birth certificate, Geftic says, his father’s name is most likely fabricated— it’s the name of a famous war hero, possibly a name his mom plucked out of a newspaper at the time, he said).

“It was a pleasant surprise. My biggest thing was I was nervous about how I was conceived. How did I get here? But now there was all of them, I felt a little better, a little more comfortable,” said Geftic.

A genealogical journey

Pat Donnellan signed up for Ancestry.com in 2009 with ordinary aspirations. She wanted to learn about her medical history, and maybe find out what part of Italy her ancestors came from too.

The 67-year-old California resident had been born in 1954 in Beth Israel Hospital, and raised by her mother early on until she moved in with her biological father, grandfather and younger sister Lucy Rodriguez in Newark, ultimately losing contact with her mom.

Before embarking on their genealogical journey, they already knew about two half-sisters — Ana Mae Moyer and Carole Maddalla — and two half-brothers, all of who shared the same mother and stayed in contact with her. Donnellan and Rodriguez thought that was the extent of their immediate family.

When Donnellan later signed up for the genealogy site, she wasn’t expecting to discover any more family members. She even forgot about her membership until, in 2019, she logged on again and saw a list of people the site had identified as relatives. That’s when she also signed up for 23andMe.

So began her and Lucy’s genealogical journey. Donnellan convinced her sister, Rodriguez, to also share her DNA with Ancestry.com, and in the span of a few months, the two tracked down five additional siblings, including Geftic.

“It’s just incredible what the DNA does... It has just become a really great tool that we all benefited from,” Rodriguez said.

First, they found Lauren McBride. McBride, 68, of South Plainfield, was born in Beth Israel Hospital in 1953 and adopted by a loving family.

As a kid, McBride says she at times wondered who her biological mother was, but those thoughts were fleeting. When she was 50 years old, McBride said, her adopted mom offered to tell her the name of her mother, but McBride declined.

Still, though, McBride was curious about possible siblings. Around 2018, she signed up for Ancestry.com and sent the company a small container of her saliva as a DNA sample. Pat Donnellan appeared as a relative on the site, and McBride messaged her, but did not hear back. But McBride’s son Leroy continued pursuing Donnellan— and eventually, in 2019, he got a response.

That’s when McBride learned she has at least four sisters: Donnellan, Rodriguez, Carole Maddalla and the deceased Ana Mae Moyer. She, Donnellan and Rodriguez share the same mother and father, they said.

“I was an only child. I always felt I had brothers and sisters... Now I have lots,” said McBride, the director of nursing at the Somerset Woods sub-acute rehabilitation facility in Somerset. “Never give up. If you have a feeling, it’s probably true.”

Within weeks, Lucy Rodriguez and Pat Donnellan connected with two other half-sisters using ancestry DNA sites — Arizona resident Karen Goldberg and Diane Lieberfarb, a retired high school guidance counselor who lives in Avon, Connecticut.

Goldberg’s son Benjamin had signed up for 23andMe in 2019 as a way to learn about his medical history, and Donnellan popped up as a relative. Donnellan then contacted Benjamin Goldberg, who connected her to his mother.

Goldberg was born in 1947 in Newark, adopted at four days old and moved to Florida when she was 3 with her adoptive parents. She doesn’t have her original birth certificate with both of her biological parents’ names, but she has a document from a Newark law office which lists her name as Karen DiNova and her mother’s name as Sarah White DiNova, with DiNova crossed out. Goldberg believes her mom used a fake first name and age in the document.

“It was a fake name on it. Obviously she did not want people to know her real name,” said Goldberg, a retired school counselor.

Lieberfarb, too, was adopted at five days old and grew up in Livingston. Like McBride, she had no urge to meet her biological mother and said she saw her adoption as a blessing. At 35 years old, she wrote a letter to her birth mother telling her not to regret putting her up for adoption and asked her parents to send it with no return address, but they had destroyed all information about her birth parents out of fear she would one day search for them.

The only fact Lieberfarb had about Virginia Helen DiNova came decades later. When her mother was 93-years-old and in hospice care, she told Lieberfarb during a visit to write down the name “Jean” on a piece of paper, telling her she had remembered her birth mother’s name and wanted her to have it.

“I had written it on the back of the receipt and dropped it in the toilet when I got home,” Lieberfarb said.

Then, about three years ago, Lieberfarb realized her children did not have any information about their family’s medical history, so she signed up for 23andMe.

She didn’t intend to look for relatives using the online service. But in 2019, Lieberfarb was sitting in the den of her house when she got a call from Pat Donnellan, a stranger turned half-sister.

After the initial shock, the two spoke for a while about their childhoods. A few hours later, she said, Donnellan called Lieberfarb back to mention that their mother, Virginia, often went by the nickname Jean.

“At that point, I had chills through my whole body,” Lieberfarb said. “Jean never held me. She never saw me…I don’t feel love strings attached, but I do with my siblings.”

Family reunion

By that fall, they were ready to finally meet in person.

Sitting near the lobby bar in the Hyatt House White Plains hotel— only a two-hour drive from where their shared mother once lived — Donnellan waited anxiously with her sisters Rodriguez and Maddalla, all eyes glued to the hotel’s double doors. It was October of 2019 and the three were about to meet two of their newly found siblings, Lieberfarb and McBride, for the first time.

Once Lieberfarb appeared, Donnellan said, the trio ran to hug her.

“When Diane walked into that lobby, and we looked at each other, it was like the hairs on the back of my neck are standing up right now because it was like I knew her... It was unbelievable,” Donnellan said.

For the next three or four days, the five siblings shopped at the White Plains mall, ate at an Italian restaurant and spent hours “laughing and crying together,” Lieberfarb said. Donnellan created photo books for each of the siblings, which included photos of their mother Jean and letters their father had written to her.

And the five spent time searching each other’s smiles and eyes for small physical similarities.

“We’re all sitting together, just like looking at each other, it’s just like, ‘Oh my god, I think we have the same eyes or you like to write? I like to write too. Oh, you hate pineapple? Oh my god I hate pineapple too,’” Donnellan said.

For Lieberfarb, the women were not strangers. She felt an instant connection, and an odd feeling that they had known each other in the past.

“There was an instant bond,” she said.

After returning home from White Plains, Rodriguez and Donnellan connected with two more siblings — Geftic and another sister who did not want to be named for this story.

Genetic tests done with 23andMe and Ancestry.com confirmed their blood relation to Geftic, Geftic said.

Goldberg, who missed the White Plains reunion because she was on a cruise, met Donnellan in Glendale, California at a restaurant in 2019.

“This was like a friend that you’ve had for many, many, many years... the friends that are like sisters,” Goldberg said.

And one sunny day last year, Geftic met with McBride, who both live in New Jersey, outside of McBride’s workplace in Somerset.

A handful of McBride’s nurse colleagues touched by their extraordinary story lined up near the building’s entrance watching the two siblings meet in an ordinary parking lot, Geftic said.

“It was quite breathtaking,” McBride said, tearing up. “That was just another person that you felt so comfortable with, even though that was the first time you met them.”

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Avalon Zoppo may be reached at azoppo2@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AvalonZoppo.