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Jennifer Skiles couldn’t stop looking at the clock. It was 2022, and she was waiting for 7 p.m., the time a man she had never met had promised to call her. His name was Paul Lonardo, and after years of searching through records, DNA databases, and scattered clues, she believed he was her father.
She had imagined his voice countless times. When the phone finally rang and he spoke, she said, It didn’t feel like talking to a stranger: “it was like being at home.”
A DNA test and a bar of soap from a New York hotel changed Skiles and Lonardo’s lives and let the family come together.
Jennifer Skiles’ childhood was marked by loss
Skiles was born in 1979 in Germany and lived with her biological mother until she was 3 years old. She then was adopted by a family in Virginia, and what started happily later became painful. “My home life was wonderful until it wasn’t,” she told WBIR Channel 10.
By 25 she had lost both of her adoptive parents. “For me, it was like I lost everybody at one time,” she said. That’s when she decided to find her biological mother, Cheryl.
Together they built a close relationship, but in 2017, Cheryl died in a car crash. Before her death, she told her daughter her father’s name so she could find him.
Who was Skiles’ father?
Her parents had met in the late 1970s while serving in the Army at Fort Dix, New Jersey. They spent a weekend together in New York, stayed at the Hotel Chelsea, and never spoke again. Lonardo never knew he had a daughter.
In 2022, a DNA test on Ancestry finally led Skiles to his family in Cranston, Rhode Island. A paternity test confirmed the result on Father’s Day that year, according to The Washington Post.
The soap he kept for decades
Lonardo had saved a small bar of soap from that hotel. “Being a 19-year-old kid, I don’t know why, but just something told me to save this,” he said. For Skiles, it meant everything: “I always mattered.”
Since then, they have visited every few months. Her three children call him grandpa, and she has traveled to Italy to learn about her roots.
On January 22, surrounded by family at Cranston City Hall, Lonardo officially adopted her. “I want my dad’s name to be attached to me,” Skiles said.
For him, the reunion changed his life. “Sometimes people will meet me, I say, you might want to shake my hand. I’m the luckiest guy you’re ever gonna meet in your whole life,” he said.