A pastor left as a baby at a vacant lot in St. Louis in 1963 recently came face to face with her blood relative. Toni DiPina, an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ in Massachusetts, met her cousin for the first time after five decades of searching for her family, thanks to an online DNA kit.
DiPina told the St. Louis Dispatch that she ordered the test kit at an ancestry website, which could help find a match in the site's database consisting of seven million users. With encouragement from her congregation, who prayed for their beloved pastor, DiPina took some samples of her DNA to send back to the site.
The test did find a match and brought DiPina to Rosetta Awkard, her blood relative from Ohio. The two met and hugged for the first time last February.
"We're three years apart and I know that if we had known each other when we were kids, we would have been friends," the pastor shared. "So there's a lot of emotions. I'm elated but I've also had to mourn all the times we could have had."
Awkard is DiPina's first cousin. The pastor was only able to find her DNA match because Awkard's 23-year-old son happened to upload his own profile to the ancestry website's database. Their online communication was strange at first but when they saw each other for the first time, the awkwardness quickly went away, especially when Awkard saw that DiPina looked just like her mother.
DiPina, however, still has questions about her parents and her real name. A social worker that took her case gave her the name Antoinette Baker before she married, and doctors who examined her as a baby assigned her birthdate.
Awkard has since been convincing her wider family to take DNA tests as well. She admitted, however, that there has been some resistance.
Meanwhile, the vacant lot where DiPina was abandoned is now called the Deaconess Center for Child Well-Being. Rev. Starsky Wilson, the center's executive who knew of DiPina's story from a former local reporter, invited the pastor to hold a sermon during its consecration last Thursday with Awkard in tow. Wilson said that God had a hand in opening the center through DiPina's story.
"It is surreal to stand before you today on the very place and ground that changed the direction of my life as an infant forever," DiPina told those who attended the service.
