A Wartime Romance, Secret Sisters and a DNA Match Make for a Shocking Reunion (Exclusive)

• For many years, Sandra Hoffmeister only had a few clues about the sister she never knew, whom her dad said lived in Australia

• Then a match on MyHeritage — introducing her to her sibling — changed everything

• “I feel like I’ve known Sandra forever and being an only child, she’s exactly the sister I wanted”

Growing up, Sandra Hoffmeister idolized her dad, a World War II veteran and decorated Los Angeles police officer named George Surber.

So she was more than stunned, as a young woman in the mid 1970s, when he revealed to her that she had an older half-sister in Australia whom he had never met.

“I was 21 when my dad told me, so I wondered about her for decades,” Hoffmeister, now 69, tells PEOPLE.

Surber died in 2012, and before that he lived with his daughter for the last nine years of his life. But Hoffmeister says she never learned much more about her long-lost sibling, other than a few clues: The sister’s mom’s name was Essie White, and they lived in Melbourne, Australia.

“I even periodically did Google searches for her mom, because daddy would speak about her when I lived with him,” Hoffmeister says.

After her father’s death, Hoffmeister moved to Poland from California, occasionally traveling back to the United States to visit her two older brothers.

Although she had no ties to Poland other than a love of the country, people assumed she was Eastern European. She started wondering about her own ethnic background and the half-sister she never knew, but she didn’t know what she might do even if she did track down White and White’s daughter, her sister.

“I thought if my sister didn’t know that whoever raised her wasn’t her real father, I didn’t want to be the one to tell her,” Hoffmeister says, “because that would be devastating.”

In April, Hoffmeister learned there was a DNA match through the website MyHeritage, which she had used to learn more about the hidden branches of her family tree.

Her sister’s name, she discovered, was Beverley Decker.

Decker, now 80, had a daughter of her own, Sally Giles, and after the DNA match on MyHeritage, Hoffmeister was able to connect with Giles and Giles’ husband, Richard. (White, Decker’s mom, had died in 2010.)

Through Giles, Hoffmeister and Decker at last reunited as sisters this year, exchanging emails and texts.

“When mum found out the truth, she was so overwhelmed with happiness,” Giles tells PEOPLE. “To hear from Sandra that George [their father] spoke very fondly of Essie [White] and shared he had another daughter helped mum feel like she was wanted and loved, albeit secretly.”

Hoffmeister says it’s amazing to look at photos of her sister and see so many similarities.

“We both like jewelry. We both like shoes. She loves dogs, I love dogs. She wore purple, and when she got married a second time, her dress was purple,” Hoffmeister says.

Naturally, “Purple is my favorite color,” she says.

Giles says they all wish it had happened sooner.

“We have a very small family, and growing up I only had one aunty and some cousins on my dad’s side,” she says. “It still feels quite surreal to know there is an entire family out there that I never knew about.”

After Hoffmeister found her sister’s family, she also unraveled more of her father’s past — and realized that Decker, her sister, had also long grappled with questions about where she came from.

“Despite having loving parents, she had a sense that maybe there was a secret there somewhere,” Giles says of Decker. “My mum is not one to ask questions, so she never explored her suspicions.”

When Decker was 15, she noticed the man’s name listed on her birth certificate as her father was not a name she recognized. It turned out to be White’s first husband, whom White married prior to giving birth. They divorced in about a year, and the family now suspects the man may have discovered he was not Decker’s biological father.

Though Decker hadn’t been able to learn much about her mom’s first husband, she took comfort in the man she later knew as her father: Henry Decker, her mom's second husband.

“She knew she was raised by a really good man, a really good dad,” Hoffmeister says.

Giles, Decker's daughter, says Henry "doted on my mum and you would never have known that she wasn’t his biological child. He would have done anything for her."

Sadly, Giles says, Henry died of cancer in 1989 but "he was the best grandfather and both he and my grandmother Essie adored my brother and I. We were all devastated when he passed away."

Decker had also seen Surber’s name before, years ago, when she stumbled upon a letter from him to her mother. But she never told anyone because she thought “he was not interested in me,” she tells PEOPLE.

Once Hoffmeister found Decker's family through the DNA match, she told them otherwise: “I told them to sit down and I would tell them the story of her [biological] dad.”

Surber grew up in Redondo Beach, Calif., and later joined the Marine Corps. He was in the first landing in the Battle of Guadalcanal in the Pacific Ocean on Aug. 7, 1942, but he soon contracted malaria and dysentery and was sent to Australia to recuperate.

There, he stayed with the White family, where he met a young woman named Essie — then returned to the States not knowing at the time that she was pregnant.

Back home in California, Surber married Mary Hinkle on Dec. 18, 1943. He’d been dating Hinkle since before his deployment, and they went on to have three children, Hoffmeister and her two big brothers, Ron and David, before divorcing.

Surber had only minimal contact with White back in Australia: She wrote to him at one point to tell him that she had given birth and married. He believed it was better not to try to reach out to his daughter with White, Hoffmeister says. But he never stopped thinking about her.

Two years after WWII ended, Surber began a decadeslong career at the Los Angeles Police Department. In 1968, he was awarded the LAPD’s Medal of Valor after saving a woman and her three children from a crashed car that burst into flames. He also served on the local Torrance City Council before retiring in the early 1990s.

Hoffmann, who was widowed in 2002, became his caretaker until his death.

Although Hoffmeister and Decker have never met or spoken in person, they have been trading emails and texts.

In an email to PEOPLE, Decker wrote that she “was in shock for weeks” after being contacted by Hoffmeister earlier this year.

“She told me how he spent time looking for us, but back then it was nearly impossible,” Decker wrote. “I feel like I’ve known Sandra forever and being an only child, she’s exactly the sister I wanted.”

Her entire life, she had felt she was not wanted by her biological father’s family — until Hoffmeister told her how Surber had held onto her memory.

“That was the nicest news to hear,” Decker wrote. “My only wish would have been to have found them earlier.”

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