22-year-old was packing her late mom’s belongings after her death — then a friend questioned one missing name in her baby book that changed her life
What we're told as children becomes the map we navigate by, until one day someone hands us a better one. The then-22-year-old TikTok user Reba VanBibber Cole was packing up her late mother's apartment when a friend found her baby book and asked about the missing half of the family tree. Reba, who goes by @rebavanbibbercole, had spent her whole life believing her father's entire family was dead, a story she'd never questioned until a friend named Brooke opened her baby book and the truth she had carried for twenty years began to crack.
It turned out that her father wasn't dead at all. He'd been alive the whole time, living a life she knew nothing about while she mourned a man who was still breathing. A phone number for a woman named Charlotte in Flat River, Missouri — her grandmother she had never met — would unravel it all. When Reba called, the woman made her repeat her name three times before telling her they'd been looking for her. She asked where her father was buried, and Charlotte told her he wasn't buried anywhere, then handed over his number. The man who picked up was already crying. He said she was his daughter.
Reba's mom passed away from pneumonia in January 1998. Because her body was weakened by multiple sclerosis, she couldn't fight it off. Her father, Walter, was said to have died in a motorcycle crash when Reba was two. That August, Brooke called at 8 a.m. with questions about her dad's full name, her twin sister's name, and where he was born. Reba's twin, Juanita Lynn, died at ten days old. Brooke's mom had felt a sudden urge to help after she found out about Reba's family and even offered to pay for a search.
Reba got hold of two phone numbers from Brooke. The first number, for Juanita, was a dead end. But the second one belonged to Charlotte. Reba introduced herself, mentioned her dad as Walter, and asked if either name rang a bell. Reba's stomach dropped when she heard that they’d been looking for her. When she asked about Walter, Charlotte gave her his phone number. Brooke warned Reba that Charlotte seemed "senile," but she called anyway, expecting nothing from it. Instead, a man answered, already crying. “Do you know who I am?” Reba asked. “Yes,” he said. “You’re my daughter.” Charlotte had already told Walter that Reba’s mother had died, leaving him heartbroken.
He said he had loved Reba's mother very much and regretted everything between them. Stunned and sobbing, Reba said she had to get off the phone. “Well, you found me,” Walter said. In an update, Reba mentioned that she met her grandmother and got to know about her huge extended family. Later, she drove to see her brother and father. In another video, she revealed that even though she is still in contact with her dad, they are not close.
Discovering family you never knew existed can turn everything you thought you knew about your past upside down. In another story, a woman named Amber Nichols was left at a Korean police station as a baby and later adopted by a family in the U.S. Growing up, she knew little about her birth mother and spent years wondering why she had given her up. Nichols searched for answers for decades, but eventually decided to stop looking. Then, two days after another DNA test, a message brought an unexpected lead to the family she had been searching for.
For more updates, you can follow @rebavanbibbercole on TikTok.