It is beautiful when a long term friendship bond gets later realized to be a blood bond. It is a famous story that 60 year-long friendship between a seventy-four-year-old Walter Macfarlane and seventy-two-year-old Alan Robinson, who been friends from elementary school to their old age. They never left each other’s side. They played football together in high school and even joked about marrying the same girl. They sent their children to the same school and have also spent family vacations together.
But things changed when Macfarlane went to get a DNA test done in search of this long lost birth father. Before he could learn about his father, he unveiled another truth that Robinson is his biological brother. Macfarlane joked that he knew this ever since they compared their hairy forearms. This truth made them feel surprised at how they have not known about this, that they were related. Robinson chuckled that it took a proper investigation and DNA test to put all of us together as one.
Early times
Macfarlane was born in Honolulu, in the year 1943. The place was then considered a turbulent city, and it was still reeling from the attack on Pearl Harbor even in the early 1940s. The town was full of air raids, scores of military personnel, and blackouts.
There were many reasons that the family of Macfarlane’s mother, Genevieve, was planning to give her son for adoption. When her family learned about this, they decided to do hanai of their grandson in which the family can adopt a person informally, i.e., with or without papers.
Cindy Macfarlane-Flores said that she had no idea that what must have her to lead to such a decision. We regard her choices in the highest regard and understand the preferences she made in the past were in her best interest.
Later, fifteen months after the birth of Macfarlane, another child, Alan Robinson, was born in Honolulu and was immediately given up adoption. Alan never got a chance to know who was his birth mother and father. Robinson said that he was raised by the best people one can imagine, but once he had his own two children, he started wondering about his history. He felt incomplete as he had nothing to fill up the health question on official forms.
Story after they met
The story of their strong and long-lasting friendship started in the sixth grade. They went to the same school where Robinson’s mother was the school nurse because of which their families would talk whenever Macfarlane was sick or hurt. They both studied in Honolulu’s Punahou School, played the football championship together and also went to the Barack Obama’s alma mater. After completing their college, they came back to Honolulu, raised their families, and hung out together.
A hunt to find the family history
A few years ago, Robinson was the first to send his samples in 23 and Me & Ancestry for the DNA test, whose results he got on his birthday. And, later after few years, Macfarlane also submitted his DNA samples to the same company in the hope of finding his biological father. The results were quite overwhelming.
Cindy, his daughter, tried to figure out the most sorted results and found out that the most reliable DNA matched with him was of some Robi737. The tests said that he could be his half-brother, who first they thought was related via father, but later they realized that they were connected via their mothers. Martha, Macfarlane’s wife, suggested checking for Robinson as there was a possibility that he might have been known by Robby. Eventually, this was confirmed that Robi737 was Robinson’s username.
