CUMBERLAND — The choices couldn’t have been easy for Louise Bitner Grell.

A widow at 21, her husband killed in World War II, she was raising a 6-month-old baby boy, alone, when she discovered she was pregnant with twins.

“She did what she felt she needed to do,” Kathy Firlie Seroskie said of the mother she never met. “If you try to put yourself in her shoes … I think she must have had a very difficult time.”

After delivering the twins in Cumberland, Grell gave them up for adoption, telling most family members that her baby had been born dead.

The twins, Kathy and Rosemary, were raised in Cumberland with their adoptive parents, the late Nellie and Vincent Firlie. Now 64 years old, they learned their birth mother’s story only a few months ago.

This Thanksgiving, they’re celebrating the discovery of a whole new family.

“This is our brother,” said Rosemary Firlie, of Cumberland, pointing to a photo of Bob Grell, a bespectacled, white-bearded man. “Isn’t he cute, with his big old baby blue eyes?”

After months of searching, with the help of friends and the Internet, the twins located Grell and his family in York, Pa. They met for the first time in March at an Outback Steakhouse in Frederick.

“It was like we always knew each other,” Rosemary Firlie said. “There was a connection that was immediate. … Who would have thought, at 64 years old, you would find a whole new family? It’s Oprah-esque.”

Though they learned at age 16 they’d been adopted, the Firlie twins didn’t immediately want to find their birth family.

“Mother and Daddy were absolutely marvelous parents,” Seroskie said of the Firlies. “They certainly set a fine example for us to follow. They taught us right from wrong. They taught us how to treat people. I always felt that as long as they were alive, I did not want to pursue it.”

When their adoptive mother and father both passed away, the twins found adoption papers inside a lock box that contained their birth mother’s name and hometown. Thus began a search, though no real progress was made until last year.

In addition to Grell, who has three children and grandchildren, the twins have met two half-sisters, who were born to their mother after she remarried in 1950. More than 50 members of the Grell family — including the twins — met for a family reunion over the summer.

“It just adds another dimension to your life,” Seroskie said. “The fact that we have found out so much about them, I can’t believe we have tracked down so many of our mother’s family.”

Now, the sisters are trying to learn more about their father, Charles William Chronister, who was a professional golfer from York, Pa. The twins don’t believe Chronister, who passed away in the 1980s, ever knew about them. Their mother, still grieving for her husband, apparently didn’t want to marry again at the time.

“I’m sure our mother had a reason,” Rosemary Firlie said.

Rosemary planned to travel to York to have Thanksgiving with her new-found brother for the first time this year. Seroskie, who was having Thanksgiving with her children and grandchildren, hopes to travel to York over the Christmas holidays.

“We never had a chance to be children together, so we’re doing it now,” said Rosemary, who talks to Grell on the phone almost every day and has made several trips to York to see him.

Never married and without children, she’s considering moving to York to be near her new family.

“I’m ready to move on now that all this has occurred,” said Firlie, who returned to Cumberland in the ’90s to care for her ailing parents.

“It’s an adventure.”

Contact Kristin Harty at kharty@times-news.com.