In July, Iverson Poff’s phone received an Instagram DM that read, ‘Bro, I think I am your brother!!!!’
Iverson Poff had been waiting for that message his entire life. “Bro, I think I am your brother!!!!” read the Instagram DM that appeared on his phone in July while he was driving down Eugene, Oregon’s familiar tree-lined streets. Poff said in a video that has gone popular across social media platforms since it was posted a few months ago that he almost drove off the road when he spotted the message. Poff had always known he had at least one biological sister someplace else in the world, according to Insider. He’d gotten a trickle of information about his birth family before the adoption agency that handled his case closed down when he was five. This contained an old photo of Poff’s biological brother wearing soccer cleats with “Brian,” his birth name, scrawled across them.
Poff, who had always been curious about his biological mother and brother—and possibly other siblings—went so far as to get an Ancestry DNA test in 2021. He dragged his feet on taking the test, however. “I just didn’t think I was ready enough yet,” he admitted. “I don’t think I was mature enough. I had no idea if I was talked about, if I was known, if I was a secret. I had no idea.” Meanwhile, Poff’s biological brother, Jaylon Vickers, has been seeking for his long-lost sibling as well. He and his two younger sisters had always known they had a sibling somewhere in the world. When Poff was born, his mother was a college student and the mother of Vickers, who was two at the time. She’d looked at adoption as a way to offer her kid a better life.
Finally, it was Vickers’ wife, Bree, who embarked on a journey to find Poff. She called her mother-in-law for any information she could have on him and received an important piece of the puzzle: the name his adoptive parents had given him, Iverson, which is significantly less common than “Brian,” enhancing their chances of locating him. Vickers and Bree used his name to search social media for Poff’s name and whereabouts. Poff was one of the first persons to appear in the search, and a little breadcrumb—a profile photo of himself as a baby—he’d posted on his Instagram page years ago in the hopes of being discovered by his original family—confirmed that he was the one they were looking for.
Poff added that not long after the brothers bonded, his biological mother and sisters reached out to him. “They asked if they could FaceTime me, and they were like, ‘We want to meet you as soon as possible. As soon as you can be here, we want you here,'” he shared. Poff came off a plane in Utah 24 hours later and immediately recognized his biological mother, who resembled him. He cried as he hugged his family and spent the next two weeks living the life he would have had if he hadn’t been adopted. The siblings quickly learned that they had many personality features. After a week and a half, Poff and his biological mother got matching tattoos of the date and constellation of the night’s sky on the day they bonded in an Oregon hospital, two decades before.
Poff stated that his adoptive family has been really supportive during this ordeal. “They’re very happy for me,” he said. “They know it’s always been something that I’ve wanted — to be able to find them. My mom has always taught me just be true to yourself, always do you, never care what anyone has to say. And so I’ve always done that.” Poff’s priority right now is making up for lost time. “I’ll just be focusing on building the relationships with my family,” he said.