A grandmother has found her biological brothers nearly six decades after she was adopted as a baby - all thanks to a do-it-yourself DNA test.
Heather Wood, 59, started searching for some answers and decided to track down her siblings.
After being reunited with her brothers, she now hopes to end a family feud and bring them together after they became estranged from each other.
Heather was born in Hereford and put up for adoption when she was just six months old.
Now a mother-of-two, she was brought up by her adopted parents in Caldicot, where she has lived for most of her life.
"I was raised by a loving family and was always told I was adopted, that I had other family', said Heather, who works in Lydney as senior sales accounts manager for local papers The Forester and The Forest of Dean and Wye Valley Review.
"I wasn't bothered through childhood about finding anything out, I was quite happy."
In an interview with the papers, she said: "It wasn't until I moved to Reading years later that I went to a friend's house and her landlady thought I looked familiar.
"I told her I was born in Hereford and was adopted, and she asked if my original name was Jennifer, which it was.
"She then said 'I know your mother', which was just sheer chance."
That led to Heather meeting her mother and brothers for the first time 39 years ago.
But, respecting the wishes of her adopted mother, the contact with her biological family ended there.
"Because of the situation - my adopted mother didn't really accept it - I didn't keep in touch. It was quite sad, being an only child it was difficult."
Years later, when she was camping in the area with her daughter Carys, they went into Hereford to explore her roots.
Visiting the house where she had met her mother, Heather learned from a neighbour that her mum had passed away many years previously.
"I asked where my family were but they didn't know. I left a few phone numbers but nothing came of it."
Heather said her husband had always said he felt there was something missing for her, and that her curiosity about her family and ancestry would come up again one day.
So on her birthday four years ago, he bought her a testing kit for family heritage website AncestryDNA, by which time her adopted mother had also sadly passed away.
She completed and returned the test and set about compiling her family tree with the information she knew, which initially threw up only a few possible distant relations.
But then, two weeks ago, she logged into the site for the first time in months to find a message from someone who thought they might be her first or second cousin.
Heather asked whether they had any contact with her brothers.
"She said 'well my mother lives opposite your brother', Dean, and that's when it all started. She contacted him and he rang me that night but put the phone down, he wanted to compile some words which he sent to me overnight about how he missed me, and that he'd always told people he had a sister."
More calls led to her contacting her long-lost brothers.
She said her first meeting with Dean, a carpenter and joiner from Hereford, and Stephen, a communications accountant for a military engineering company who lives in Tewkesbury, was 'super emotional'.
"Me and Dean were texting for a week before we arranged to meet - we were both a wreck leading up to that.
"It seems like it was meant to be, because all those years ago I lost contact, and if my cousin's daughter hadn't done a DNA test, I probably never would've met them again.
"It seems like fate - people don't get this chance once in their lives, and I've had it twice."
She has also been supportive of her 89-year-old adoptive father, who lives with her.
"I didn't want to upset him, but he's said that it's exciting and he's embraced it, he understands that the chances of it happening like this are slim."
Heather, who has two grandchildren, is now looking forward to her family developing new relationships with her brothers, as well as her niece and two nephews, over the coming weeks and months.
