ENTERPRISE — After more than five decades apart, Gary Koca finally met his twin daughters face-to-face on June 18.

Several hours later, he said he was “shaking inside, still.”

“And I probably will all the time they’re here,” Koca said of his daughters, Marie Day and Marci Brown. “It just makes me so happy. And look how beautiful they are.”

The meeting was meaningful because Koca didn’t even know the women existed until  2019, when an AncestryDNA test revealed they were related to him.  

After delaying their first meeting because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the trio finally met in person this Father’s Day weekend at Koca’s Enterprise home.

The new family bond means Koca has a huge extended family, including 13 new great-grandchildren.

Ancestry.com brings family together

While serving as a cook in the U.S. Navy in the 1960s, Koca fathered two daughters, but didn’t know it at the time.

Fifty-two years later, one of the women, Marie Day, reached out to Koca’s brother, Ronald, on Ancestry.com. She had taken the AncestryDNA test, which showed that Ronald Koca was one of her close relatives. She asked him if any of his family members had been a cook in the Navy.

Ronald Koca responded, knowing that she was referring to his brother, Gary Koca. He gave Day his brother’s phone number, and a few days later, Day spoke with her father for the first time, chatting on the phone for an hour and a half.

Day didn’t cry then because she was driving and had to focus on the road, but she recalled that her father was weeping.

“Marci was crying too,” Day said. “She was all excited.”

Day and Brown’s stepfather died a few years ago. Meeting their biological father was “a lot to process,” she said. 

“I didn’t know what to think at the time,” she said. “But I was just happy that [Marci] was more ecstatic than I was because I was just like, ‘I gotta process all this.’”

The news that he had twin daughters also took Koca by surprise. Until then, Koca, who has stepchildren, didn’t know he had any biological children.

He decided to take a DNA test, which confirmed he was Day and Brown’s father.

“To realize at the age of 74 years old that you have children — kind of remarkable,” Koca said.

“Now, it’s real”

Since that initial phone call, the father-daughter trio have talked about once a week on FaceTime.

They wanted to meet face-to-face in spring 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic pushed the gathering back more than a year.

But finally, Day and Brown made the trip from Bradenton, Florida to see their father and stepmother, Betty, on Father’s Day weekend. 

Sitting in Koca’s living room on the first day of the visit, Brown said meeting her father in person was a different experience from FaceTime calls.

“Us FaceTiming over the last two years, or since this pandemic has happened, it’s one thing,” Brown said. “But to actually see them in person now, it’s like, ‘Now, it’s real. Now, it’s—’”

“He’s actually a human being,” Koca interjected, as he and Brown laughed.

While connecting with Koca, Brown is getting to meet “the wonderful people” on her father’s side of the family. She remarked that meeting Koca has been a “new life” and a “new experience” for her.

“I’m ready,” she said. “I’m so ready.”

Brown and Day are grandparents, as well. Through his daughters, Koca has 13 great-grandchildren and a great-great-grandchild born recently.

He described finding out he has two daughters as “a gift from God.”

“To know that I have actual children of my own is a big blessing to me,” he said.