DECATUR, Ala. (WAFF) – Shannon Privett and her father say ancestry.com brought them together, but it was luck. Neither of them were searching for each other.

Shannon Privett and Peter Fitzpatrick

“My main thing was just for health issues was wanting to know and just out of curiosity, I’ve always been interested in genealogy, said Privett.

“I did ancestry just to find out my ethnicity. I had about a 99 percent knowledge of my ethnicity but I wanted to just verify it and some of my nieces and nephews had done it and I wanted to see if it really worked and if I matched up to them and all of that and it did,” said Peter Fitzpatrick.

Shannon got a little more information from ancestry. After she filled out the information the website told her about close relatives and the name of her father, someone she never until recently.

“At the very top of my list it said parent child relationship and it said Pete Fitzpatrick and I kind of had to do a double take on that one and it was like am I reading that correctly,” asked Privett.

“6 or 8 months later I got a text from Shannon and it was quite the surprise. It was an absolutely magnificent surprise. I had no clue I had another daughter, let alone another daughter in Alabama and it was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me in my life,” said Fitzpatrick.

Shannon is now making some plans to go to Florida, to not only spend more time with her father, but to spend time with some more relatives she never knew she had.

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