One day you have no children - and they next day you have 37.
This is exactly what happened to Peter Ellenstein, who was stunned after receiving a message on Facebook in October 2017 which changed his life forever.
The message was from a young woman called Rachel White who believed 62-year-old Peter, from California, to be her biological father.
“I was so shocked it was like a bolt from the blue - I held it out for a friend to read, who couldn’t believe it either," he told The Sun.
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"I messaged my then wife and siblings about it, who wondered if it could be a scam."
It turns out that in the 80s and 90s, Peter needed to raise money to start a theatre company and one of the ways he did that was by being a sperm donor.
Despite making a load of drop offs at his local sperm bank, Peter thought nothing of it - until Rachel got in touch decades on in 2017.
"I messaged Rachel back and we arranged to meet later that night, and it was amazing," Peter said.
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"We hugged each other and cried, but we hit it off instantly and ending up talking until the early hours of the morning.”
With help from his biological daughter, Peter had now met 34 of his biological children so far.
He explained: “I met up three weeks later with Rachel again, and she had a list of another 11 children that she had found.
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“Then I went on a genealogy site and I was finding another one each month and began reaching out to them.
“When I first made those donations I never imagined it would come to this.
“At the time, the clinic told me the donations were anonymous, although I agreed that any offspring could track me down in the event of a medical emergency - if they needed my bone marrow for a transplant for example.
“So I went away and mostly forgot all about it.”
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Peter - who has been previously married - never thought to start a family of his own, but he's said that 'meeting all my biological children has enriched my life enormously'.
He keeps in touch with his kids in a private Facebook group where they share jokes and their love of board games.
“It's truly the best thing that has ever happened to me," he added. “It’s made me learn a lot about myself and made me a nice person.
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“I never had a family of my own and perhaps it has made it easier that I didn’t have any ties to a biological family when I started to meet my donor children.
“It’s not the same relationship that you have if you raise a child - some of them I’m very close to, and some I have a lesser connection with.
“The relationships I have with them are based on what they want from me.”
Featured Image Credit: Facebook/Peter Ellenstein