HUNTSVILLE, Ala (WHNT) — A North Alabama father finally has some answers in his decades-long search for his family.

Ray Johnson of Huntsville and his wife, Loretta, have been married for 45 years. The couple has a grown son but there’s always been something missing from their family.

“I’ve been searching 47 years. We’ve been looking, lots of prayers, searching,” Johnson told News 19.  

This story starts 51 years ago. Ray was fresh off his time serving with the U.S. Navy in Vietnam. He met and married his first wife and settled in California where they were raising a 3-year-old daughter and a 6-month-old son.

“Jeremy was six months old at the time and Nicole was three years old at the time,” Ray said.

From the living room of his Huntsville home, Ray holds onto only two photos that capture the last moments of him holding his young children.

“On the day of our fourth anniversary, February 17th, I was served with divorce papers,” he said.

A few months later, Ray’s world would come even more undone when he arrived at his ex-wife’s house to pick up the children for a weekend visitation with their dad. He would never see or hear from his children again.

“I was supposed to go pick them up in San Jose. The grandparents and their mom and the kids were gone,” he said. “There was an APB put out in seven counties for a warrant for her arrest for kidnapping and seven counties from Monterey to the surrounding Bay area, and that was the last I saw them.”

Johnson said through the use of private investigators over the years, it was discovered their mother had changed the children’s names and even managed to change their birth certificates and simply disappear.

When asked how she pulled it off, Johnson explains that the answer went to the grave with their mother. She died last year.

The death of the children’s mother would end up becoming the catalyst that led to a bombshell email notification Ray received while seeing a movie with Loretta on February 14 this year.

“The credits were running, Ray turned his phone back on and he had an email from his brother that said that he was gonna have a great day. He had an email from Jeremy. Ray started crying and he told me that they found Jeremy, and I leaned over and was hugging him and crying right there in the theater,” Loretta explained.

Ray says his son entered his DNA into Ancestry.com. The results came back connecting him to his dad.

He explains that after his mom passed it was much easier for his son to try to find his father.

Within weeks of receiving the news, Ray’s son and his family arrived on a flight to Nashville, where Ray and Loretta waited for the reunion to happen between a father and the son he had not seen since his first year of life.

“It was just exhilarating. Just totally awesome after 47 years to put a face to the name that I knew, but there was that big gap there between the time I saw his pictures at six months old and now he’s 47 years old,” Ray said.

Easter weekend was spent making up for 47 years of missed hugs and just catching up on a lot of lost time.

“He had my dimples, my chin, my nose, my blue eyes, and I found out while he was here that he was left-handed and so was I,” Ray said.

This is the story of a dad who didn’t give up on a son, who just so happened to be waiting for the right time to go searching for his dad.

“Oh, I never stopped. Winston Churchill said it right. Never give up,” Ray said.

Plans are already in the works for the family to come together this summer so that the extended family can meet Ray’s son for the first time. As for Ray’s daughter, he says they have not heard from her yet but he continues to pray that happens soon.