For more than four years, Blair Clark and his wife, Leah, who live in the Philippines, have worked to reunite family members through their YouTube show, The Leah and Blair Slog. Many of the people they’ve helped are adoptees searching for their biological parents and Amerasian Filipinos searching for fathers who were stationed at U.S. naval and air bases.
Recently, Blair experienced an incredible twist of fate when he found himself on the other side of the equation.
“Our purpose was simply to shine a light into the darkness of other people’s pasts. But the universe has a strange, beautiful way of turning the camera back on you,” Blair said in an episode of the show.
MyHeritage, an ancestry and DNA testing site, sent Blair a testing kit, and he was shocked to discover a 22.7% DNA match with Fiona, a 66-year-old woman living in San Antonio, Texas, who could be either his aunt or half-sister.
All signs pointed to the ‘family secret’
When Blair saw the match, it became pretty clear that he had discovered a long-lost sister. When he was 20, his mother, Isabel, told him she had placed a child for adoption when she was 19. After World War II, women in the U.K. who had children outside of marriage were often seen as “moral failures,” and many were pressured or forced to place their children for adoption.
In the three decades after World War II, around 200,000 U.K. mothers were forced to give up their children for adoption. Isabel passed away in 1999 at age 59.
Fiona was adopted shortly after birth and raised in Scotland and Bermuda. She has worked in the oil business, human resources and retail sales management and has lived in Louisiana, Yemen and San Antonio, Texas, where she currently resides. Fiona has two daughters, three grandsons and a great-grandson.
Ten years ago, Fiona signed up for a MyHeritage account. Then, after Blair joined the site, she finally got a ping that would change her life.
“When I received a ping from MyHeritage that I had a nephew or a brother, I was shocked and excited. It was what I had hoped for all my life,” she said.
“After 66 years, I have hoped that someone would come find me. Realistically, I knew deep down that I was a secret from the past… I didn’t want to cause any hurt or pain, so I never really looked, yet always hoping that I would be found instead,” she said in a statement.
After connecting through MyHeritage, Blair and Fiona met over Zoom, where she learned that Blair was her brother—and that she now had three brothers. When Fiona finally saw a photo of her mother, the moment was both emotional and surreal.
“I was looking at the face of a woman I had never known, yet suddenly realized she was my Mum. A stranger in a photograph, and somehow a person who had been connected to me my entire life,” she told Upworthy. “I found myself staring at her, wondering about her life, what she was like, and imagining all the things I wish I could have known.”
If only Mum could have met her…
“If Mum knew I had tracked down her daughter, Fiona, she would be incredibly proud,” Blair told Upworthy. “The shock of discovering a big sister took a few weeks to wrap my head around. But the moment I saw Fiona’s picture, the resemblance to Mum was undeniable. That face reinforced everything. It made me entirely ready to start this new chapter and welcome Fiona into our family and lives!”
The irony of a man known for reuniting families on YouTube finding his own long-lost sister through a DNA test wasn’t lost on Blair.
“For years, Leah and I have stood behind the camera, tracking down leads, analyzing old photos, and watching other families get those massive, tearful moments of closure. I always thought I understood the weight of what we were doing,” Blair told Upworthy.
“I always felt the joy for these other people, but I was always the outsider looking in, and then one day to suddenly be the person sitting in the same chair, looking at my long-lost sister Fiona, it completely broke my heart what she had gone through, not knowing her true identity for 65 years,” he continued.
Blair lives in the Philippines, and his two brothers are in Australia, so the four siblings hope to meet in Thailand toward the end of 2026. Fiona currently has a GoFundMe campaign to help make the trip happen.
“As Blair so wisely put it, ‘We may not have grown up together, but at least we can grow old together,” Fiona said.
