Oregon Woman Tracks Down Father and Meets His Husband: 'Now I Get' Two Dads (Exclusive)

How Alexandra Lovett found more love than she imagined

For her 33rd birthday, in 2020, Alexandra Lovett’s mother gifted her a genealogy DNA kit for a special purpose.

“She knew that I wanted to find him,” Lovett tells PEOPLE for a story in this week's issue. “I’ve always been curious about my father since I realized [as a child] that particular member of our family was not present.”

Over the years, Lovett had repeatedly asked her mom, Jimmi Sue, for details about her dad, who was described as a man her mom had a one-night stand with in 1986. All Jimmi Sue could remember was his first name.

“She’s like, ‘I don’t know. He’s gone. He’s just gone,’ ” Lovett says now.

But Lovett kept wondering and searching. At one point, because her mom thought she remembered that her father’s family had owned a Mexican restaurant in Denver, she and a friend called every Mexican restaurant in the phone book. No luck.

And then a breakthrough: She was eating lunch at work one day in April 2020 when she received the DNA results from her kit. She thought they would lead her to an aunt or a cousin, but the first hit, along with a full name, was a 100% father-daughter match.

“I didn’t believe my eyes,” Lovett says. “I didn’t think it was going to be that easy. I had spent so long looking for him in such fruitless ways.”

She logged onto Facebook and — just like that – she found her father, Wolf Martinez. His profile was public, so she got another happy surprise: He was married to a man named Michael Ouellette.

“I was so excited, I said to my co-worker, ‘I never had one dad, and now I get two!’ ” says Lovett. “I was ecstatic.”

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On April 7, 2020, she sent Martinez a friend request and a private message explaining who she was. She said she didn’t need anything from him — “I just want to know who you are.”

She told him to take some time to think about it, but she hoped he would respond.

The next day, Martinez sent her a reply asking for her phone number, which she shared. He and his husband FaceTimed her immediately.

“I hadn’t even wiped the sleep out of my eyes,” she says. “It was great. I met him and my stepdad, Michael, at the same time and I was just overwhelmed with how loving they were right off the bat and how much they wanted to know me as well as answering any questions I had. It was really sweet.”

Martinez, a 60-year-old shiatsu practitioner for Empathy Architects in Sante Fe, N.M., recalls the joy of connecting with his daughter — and his surprise, too. He tells PEOPLE he almost deleted her friend request and was stunned and confused when he read her first message.

“I was in shock,” says Martinez. “I'm a gay man. I'm married. My husband and I've been together for 24 years now. I was like, ‘How is this even possible?’ ”

Before connecting with Lovett, he checked his own DNA page on Ancestry.com, saw the 100% probability match with her and wondered if there was some kind of mix-up.

But once they began to talk, they pieced together the truth: Martinez has been sober for 31 years but admits that in his early 20s, he would drink until he blacked out — and did have sexual relations with “a few women.”

Lovett told him he had a one-night stand with her mother, whom met him at a club in Denver in 1986. Martinez soon called Lovett’s mom, who told him, "I'm so sorry that 33 years have passed and you're just now finding out that we have a daughter" — but even then, he says, he had no memory of their encounter.

While Lovett’s mom remembered Martinez’s given first name, Greg, he now goes by “Wolf,” which was given to him by his elders. (He has both Diné, more commonly known as Navajo, and Ute ancestry.)

During their first phone conversation, Lovett shared that her last name in Anglo-Norman French translates to “wolf cub.”

“That's when I almost dropped the phone. I was like, ‘That's just too much,’ ” Martinez says.

They began talking daily and met in person in May 2020. Then they drove together to Denver to meet Martinez’s mother, sister and cousins.

“I really love how close we became, just instantly. It wasn't learning about a stranger. It was reconnecting with somebody that I haven't seen in a long time. It felt like that,” says Lovett, now a 37-year-old caregiver at a behavioral health facility in Klamath Falls, Ore.

Father and daughter share the same smile and the same laugh. “The family resemblance is undeniable,” Martinez says.

They love the same foods, they have the same habits, the same mannerisms and they pick the same seat at the movie theater. Martinez’s husband told Lovett, “Oh my God, you guys are the same person.”

“My whole life, I’ve been questioning who this man was,” she tells PEOPLE. “It just feels like a piece of the puzzle, it's solved and there's peace in that.”

They’ve gone roller blading, zip lining, hiking and to the movies. They have visited the Grand Canyon and hiked Oregon’s Crater Late. “He’s taken me all kinds of places already,” she says.

She calls Martinez her “Papa” and refer to his his husband as “Dad.”

“I was so ecstatic that they were both so accepting and just like, ‘Yes, we have this daughter now. You're ours,’ “ Lovett says.

Ouellette, 57-year-old antiques dealer, says that over the years, he and Martinez had discussed fatherhood. He remembers, “always the longing to be a parent, but it didn’t seem possible,” he says.

When they first connected with Lovett, Martinez admits he worried about what it would be like to try and build a new connection because he had never been a father. “What really came clear to me is, I don't have to do anything but love her. That's the only thing I have to do,” he says.

When both Lovett’s mother and grandmother died on the same day in November 2021 — her mom from a coma and grandmother after a fall — Martinez and Ouellette arrived at her house to comfort and support her the next day.

“It felt like the universe taking care of us — the way she found us before her mother’s passing so she’d never be alone,” Ouellette says.

She spent the following Christmas with her dads.

“They've been really there for me,” she says, adding, “That's what you can ask for from a father, right?”

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