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There are a few facts about yourself you have never once had to check.
Your name. Your birthday. Whether you like olives. And how many brothers and sisters you have.
Nobody recounts that last one. You don’t wake up on a Tuesday morning and think, hang on, let me do that again. The number has been the same since you were four years old.
Frank McGrath’s number was zero.
It was zero for seventy-six years. Then, in September 2024, his phone buzzed.
Seventy-Six Years of Being the Only One
Frank lives in Longueuil, just across the river from Montreal. He was born in Shawinigan Falls on February 29, 1948 — a leap-year baby, which means he has technically had about nineteen real birthdays and has heard every single joke about it.
He grew up an only child. No brothers, no sisters, nobody sleeping on the floor at Christmas.
What buzzed his phone was a DNA match. A close one.
Months earlier, in the Netherlands, a woman named Amber Hogervorst had talked her grandfather into spitting in a tube and mailing it off to a laboratory.
It came back with a name on it.
Frans Bannink. Almelo, the Netherlands. Frank’s older brother.
What Their Father Took With Him
Staff Sergeant Dermot McGrath served with the Canadian Army’s 4th Division. In the summer of 1945 he was in the Netherlands, handing out food to a country that had spent the previous winter starving.
That is where he met Frans’s mother.
That September he was in Belgium, where he met the woman who would become Frank’s mother. They married in December.
Frans was born in Wierden in May 1946. Frank was born in Quebec in February 1948.
Dermot McGrath died in 1999. He was married to Frank’s mother for the rest of his life, and in all those years he never said one word about the son he had left behind in Holland.
Which is the odd thing about a secret like that. It doesn’t get kept forever. It gets kept until the technology catches up.
A Hotel Lobby in Amsterdam
In April 2025, Frank and his wife Johanne flew to the Netherlands.
The brothers had been talking for months by then. But talking is not the same as standing in a room.
Frank later said the thing that undid him wasn’t only having a brother. It was having a brother who looked like their father.
“The minute we embraced, the floodgates opened,” he told the Globe and Mail. “And it was the start of a beautiful relationship.”
Johanne got a sister-in-law out of the deal. Her verdict: same values, both huggers, both criers.
Frank’s summary was shorter. “Like winning the lottery.”
The Part Nobody Puts in the Advertisement
Here is what interests me more than the DNA test.
The test took about four seconds of genuine effort. Spit, seal, mail. The answer came back and that was that.
Everything since has been ordinary technology doing ordinary things.
The brothers live an ocean apart. Frank speaks English and French. Frans speaks Dutch. They are 78 and 80 years old.
So they use WhatsApp. They use FaceTime. Frank is learning Dutch. Frans is working on his English. And when they get properly stuck, Amber — the granddaughter who started all of this — steps in and translates.
That’s the whole system. Two men in their late seventies on video calls, patiently building a brotherhood out of bad grammar and a shared face.
One Honest Word Before You Order One
These kits do find things.
Sometimes it’s a brother. Sometimes it’s news that a family specifically arranged itself to avoid. Before anyone in your house spits in a tube, it’s worth a conversation about what you would all want to do if something came back that nobody expected.
Frank got lucky. Not everybody does. That isn’t a reason to skip it — just a reason to go in with your eyes open.
Eighty Years Is a Long Time
Their father kept that secret for fifty-four years, and he almost certainly assumed it would hold.
It didn’t. It was undone by a gift nobody asked for and a granddaughter who wouldn’t let it go.
Nearly eighty years is a long time to not know somebody.
It turns out it isn’t too long.
