Woman flies from Australia to surprise parents in New Mexico for Thanksgiving and it's so heartwarming

Editor's note: This article was originally published on November 29, 2022. It has since been updated.

Family reunions can leave one emotional, especially when it comes to parents meeting children after a long time. One family is making rounds on the internet after a video of a woman flying across the world to surprise her parents for Thanksgiving. In this video uploaded on Twitter, a daughter calls her parents and they are seen thanking her for paying for the restaurant they are eating in. Then she tells them that she is in the "Outback too" and the parents think that she is also in a restaurant called "Outback" in Australia. After a few seconds of laughter, she says, "Look right" and they see her walking into the restaurant. The parents start crying, then they both are in disbelief, the mother says, "Noooo, I can't believe it. Oh, my goodness." 

The video is captioned, "My sis has been in Australia for the past 3 years…hence the restaurant that she said she’d pay for, just to surprise my parents #thanksgiving" 

The video was captured by the woman's brother Zanen. He said that his sister Teige Zeller was supposed to come home in early December but moved her flight to surprise her parents, Marty and Gae Zeller, according to GMA.

In another reunion story, Nancy Galloway decided to purchase a DNA test kit in 2019 to confirm if Alan Freedman was her father as told by her mother. "It was like a bomb had gone off when I first learned I have had a daughter who was out in the world for 50 years without me knowing," Freedman told The Courier-Journal. 

This is how her mother met Freedman. Freedman had gone to Kentucky to gather information about starting a business in Louisville, and that's when he met Galloway's mother Rosalind Mudd. Before Freedman continued his travels, they were together for a few weeks. For 26 years, Mudd didn't tell her daughter the identity of her Australian father. "Through the years, people have asked me about my ethnic background and my kids would come home from school with a family tree to fill out," remembers Galloway. "I found my birth certificate when I was 12 years old and the line for 'father' was empty. I never had any information about where I came from on my father's side. It was just a blank, and I had nothing to pass on to my children." 

Only when her mother became terminally ill, she decided to tell her the truth.  "I was so shocked by what she was telling me that I didn't think to ask for specifics like how to spell my dad's name," Galloway said. "By the time I realized I needed that information it was too late — Mom died the day after she told me." 

However, now Galloway believes that she and her father know each other really well. They frequently chat with each other and also have face-to-face video chats and organize visits to each other's houses, play Wordle, and also share family news. Galloway describes her father as "the sweetest man alive." Also, she is happy to know that she has two younger siblings who live in Australia. "I was blessed to grow up in Louisville with an amazing older and a large and loving family," she said. "Now, I have two younger brothers in Sydney and younger nephews and nieces there, too. Best of all, my own children can now fill in their family tree and it includes so much more family than we could have ever imagined."