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After Searching For 7 Years, Woman Learns Her Sister Lives Next Door

June 29, 2018

A woman who spent seven years searching for her sister discovered that she had moved in right next door.

Dawn Johnson and Hillary Harris / Courtesy of Hillary Harris

Hillary Harris, 31, from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, was adopted as a baby. She knew she had a sister, and she knew the sister's name from her adoption file - Dawn Johnson - but she couldn't find her.

Harris had spent years trying to track down her long-lost sibling on the internet with no luck. Then one day a couple moved in next door, and the woman's name was Dawn. And she was from Greenwood, Wisconsin, the same place Harris' sister lived, according to the adoption file.

"My husband and me joked for a few weeks that she was my sister but we didn't know her last name," Harris told SWNS.

However, that changed when Harris spotted Dawn's last name on a delivery that arrived for her.

"One day she got a delivery of shingles for her roof and it was addressed to Dawn Johnson. I began to shake. It was such an intense moment. It was late at night, but I finally got the courage to text her and ask her who her dad was."

In that moment, it clicked for Johnson, too. Johnson, 50, was raised by her stepfather and first met her birth father when she was 18. She had never thought about whether he had other children, but it made sense that he did.

The long-lost sisters talked and cried for hours on the phone that night, they told the NY Post.

"Of all the hundreds of thousands of homes we bought a house that shares a driveway with my sister," Johnson said.

Over the past year, the sisters have become inseparable.

"When I finally met Dawn, it was the missing piece to my puzzle," Harris told The Washington Post. "She fills so many voids in our lives - she's like a big sister and mother to me."