TIFTON — After more than 60 years, mountains of phone calls and a little help from Ancestry.com, a daughter managed to reunite with her father – and saw her family grow a whole lot bigger.

Father and daughter Bill Griffin of Tifton and Kim Fornachon met for the first time Sept. 16, just in time to celebrate Griffin’s birthday as a reunited family.

Fornachon was born in San Rafael, California, in 1958, after her mother separated from her stepfather and started a relationship with Griffin, then serving at the Hamilton Air Force Base.

During this relationship, Fornachon’s mother became pregnant with her, and though she loved Griffin, she worried that their relationship would create strife between her and her father-in-law.

“She was in love with Bill but had three small children, and was afraid of her father-in-law trying to gain custody if she divorced my dad,” Fornachon said. “So she told Bill she was going back to my dad.”

However, Fornachon’s mother had withheld information about her pregnancy from Griffin, leaving him in the dark about his new daughter.

Fornachon would also live much of her life unaware of Griffin, but when a DNA test taken in her 30s revealed that she and her stepfather were not biologically related, her mother told her the truth of the circumstances surrounding her birth, and provided her with a clue to start her search for her biological father: a photo with his name on the back and the information that he lived in a small Georgian town starting with the letter “A.”

However, Fornachon was reluctant to begin this search out of love and respect for her step-father, whom she considered her father and loved dearly.

She refrained from doing any digging on Griffin until after his death in 2012, but even then work kept her occupied, with scarce time, if any, to devote to finding Griffin.

In 2015, she was forced to give up her line of work after a serious back injury left her disabled, but this proved to have a silver lining, as it finally gave her the free time to search for her biological father.

Fornachon worked her way through the cities of Georgia that began with “A,” starting with Atlanta and working down to smaller and smaller towns, checking in with each Bill Griffin she came across to see if they were the one she was looking for.

But with a name as common as “Bill Griffin,” she might as well have been searching for a needle in a haystack.

“I kept going through the alphabet for well over a month,” Fornachon said. “It was so discouraging and I finally decided to stop.”

Changing tactics, her mother offered aid through hiring TV personality Troy Dunn, who had experience in reuniting people with their long-lost loved ones. However, even Dunn’s efforts could turn up nothing.

Fornachon ultimately gave up her search, certain it would be impossible to find her father.

To her surprise, a new lead would manifest in a surprising place.

A few years later, on May 28 of this year, Fornachon received a notification from Ancestry.com, informing her that she had received a DNA match from one Michael Kitchens, her maternal cousin. While nothing seemed worthy of note at first, it was his place of residence that caught her interest.

“The ‘Georgia’ part hit, so I clicked on his name and wrote to him asking if he recognized my mom’s name,” Fornachon said. “He wrote back saying no, and mentioned his family name of Griffin, and I wrote back asking if he knew a Bill Griffin. He said, ‘Yes, that’s my first cousin.’ He asked how I knew him and I said, ‘That’s my father!’”

With Kitchens’ assistance, Fornachon established contact with her father, and within 10 minutes, the two were speaking to one another for the first time.

While Fornachon had spent years searching for her father, Griffin had never even known he had another daughter. Fornachon remembers her father being at a loss for words during this conversation.

Nevertheless, he was elated to connect with her.

“(Meeting her) was great,” Griffin said. “I’m tickled to death with her because she’s a beautiful, sweet girl.”

The two have maintained constant contact since, messaging one another daily to talk about their lives, families and everything they had missed in one another’s lives.

Through these conversations, Fornachon learned that she had three other siblings, David, Cindy and Kenny, whom she quickly began to form connections with and Griffin learned about his grandson, Jason.

As Griffin’s birthday neared, Fornachon decided a proper reunion was in order, and she and her son made the week-long trip to Tifton to be with him and his, now their, family.

“We spent four days there and it was wonderful, absolutely wonderful,” Fornachon said. “To give him a hug. … I felt like a little girl again.”

At the celebration held for her father’s birthday, Fornachon got the chance to meet several of her other relatives as well, encountering more than 30 family members and recounting how, to her surprise, that was still only a portion of the family tree.

She also had the chance to spend some personal time with her father, spending a day with him and her son out on a lake.

Ultimately, Fornachon owes the opportunity to finally meet her father to her mother, who passed in 2021 from the coronavirus, shortly before she met Griffin. She believes she helped in guiding her to her long-lost father.

“We were best friends,” Fornachon said. “She was 85, and I handled everything for her including all of her banking, bills, medical appointments, took her everywhere she needed to go and called her every morning. When she contracted COVID, I wasn’t allowed in the hospital until the last day of her life, when I was allowed to spend the last eight hours of her life with her. However, she was not coherent. I watched her take her last breath, and for the next seven months, I barely left the house. So I know she helped me find Dad.”

Fornachon and Griffin maintain constant contact to this day, and are eagerly planning a much larger trip with even more of their family. However, they said they are just happy to have one another in their lives.

“I’m thankful for the time we have now, that I get to tell him I love him, that I get to see what a kind, loving and godly man he is,” Fornachon said. “I want to visit him as much as I can to hug him and memorize the smile of the man I call Dad.”