At first blush, what's happening around an Arlington kitchen table seems like any other family at a family reunion, excitedly catching up by sharing photos and swapping stories.
But would you believe us if we told you that most of the people huddled lovingly around the table are only just meeting each other?
"It's been wonderful," Barbara Hummel said of the reunion.
In order to fully understand how special this moment is, we'll first take you to 1991. That's when Hummel tracked down two of her father's five siblings. The six siblings had been separated since they were put in a west Texas orphanage in the 1920s.
WFAA was there for their tearful reunion at DFW Airport.
"I think it meant the world to him when the two sisters came in," Hummel said.
But Hummel says it proved much tougher tracking down her dad's other three siblings and their relatives -- as well as relatives of the sisters they'd met, until recently.
"My son and I received a DNA kit as a Christmas gift and so we did the DNA," Gail Ranson of McAllen said.
Ranson knew her mother was adopted, but never dreamed her DNA results would include family she didn't know about. She got a call from Barbara, who'd also done the test and had her information entered into a database. It told her their parents were siblings.
"She said she’d been searching and searching for years and trying to find the missing links, and she finally had," Ranson said of Barbara.
Dolores Schmitt's mother Sybil was one of the two sisters who'd reunited with Hummel's dad at DFW nearly 30 years ago, but Dolores had lost track of any new family since then. She knew she likely had lots of cousins, as she knew her mother had many separated siblings, but it wasn't until her niece and nephew took the DNA test and got a call from Barbara that it was confirmed.
"Say what you want," Schmitt said. "It doesn’t matter how old you are, this is a magnificent thing."
So here they are: first cousins from five of the six original siblings, gathered in Arlington this weekend to meet for the very first time.
"We are family," Hummel said. "We are all family."
And that's a bond no amount of time apart can break.