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Hugs, smiles and a comfort borne by two siblings who never met but shared a mother. That was the scene at the Milwaukee Public Museum on Saturday morning when Jim Dostal, 80, met his half-sister, 85-year-old Marilee Goffin.

Marilee Goffin had grown up in Appleton, worked on and off at the Appleton Post-Crescent newspaper for 37 years and volunteers at St. Vincent de Paul and St. Joseph’s food pantry.

Jim Dostal had lived all over, before and after his six years in the Navy, and worked in Michigan at a foam production company.

Both of them shared a mother who gave her daughter up for adoption as an unwed mother in the 1930s.

More than 80 years later, they met for the first time.

Jim Dostal always knew he had a sister.

His mother, Esther, sat him down when he was 17 and headed for the Navy:

“She said, ‘I’ve got something to tell you … you’ve got a sister.’”

And that, Dostal’s wife, Linda, recalls, was it.

His mother didn’t tell him that she had to leave his sister, whom she named Judith, in Wisconsin because she was told she could not bring the baby back home.

“They had a very different thought back then — a little Neanderthal, they were in that day, if you ask me,” Jim Dostal recalled. “They were very protective of the family name and they hid behind that.”

Judith stayed with a private nurse for nine months. Then, a childless couple, Cyril and Elizabeth Goffin, asked if they could take her.

A court in Outagamie County granted the Goffins adoption rights on June 19, 1935, and they renamed their new little girl Marilee, after a poet’s daughter.

All of this was kept a secret from Jim — and Marilee.

As Marilee’s adoptive mother told her, “’I think you were a skeleton in the closet.’”

Most of Marilee’s family history remained hidden until her niece, Colleen Grimmer, started investigating using the DNA and genealogy tool Ancestry.com.

“I like puzzles,” Grimmer said chuckling.

She initially planned to give Marilee an unforgettable 85th birthday present: a photo of her mother. In the course of her research, she found Jim Dostal, Marilee’s brother.

She tracked him down after Susan Ulbrich, Marilee’s niece, popped up on Ancestry.com. Ulbrich’s father was Jim Dostal.

Grimmer has made a hobby of connecting family members through Ancestry. She connected a coworker and two other people with their relatives. She also found that Esther herself had been adopted by Paul and Ethyl Kobs and says she’s close to figuring out Esther’s biological parents.

Marilee continued the trend, adopting her only child.

The half-siblings share much in common: They agree family is important, flinch at the sight of a camera and enjoy baking.

Their biological mother died young of a heart attack, which came as a surprise to Jim, who said she was in perfect health.

“She never thought she would die at 51, but she always kept it in her head that she lost you,” he said, pointing to his sister.

Now that the two have finally found each other, they have a lot of catching up to do.

Contact Talis Shelbourne at (414) 223-5261 or tshelbourn@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter at @talisseer and Facebook at @talisseer.

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