Melissa Gilbert shares news of major family discovery as she returns to the spotlight

Melissa Gilbert is slowly making her return to social media after some time away following her husband Timothy Busfield’s arrest.

The actress, 62, has been steadfast in her support for her husband, although has since shied away from discussing it much and has kept her social media presence more personal and light-hearted, often linking back to Little House on the Prairie.

And speaking of, in her latest update, the star shared that she had just discovered a surprising and coincidental link between her character on the show and her birth father.

Melissa was born in 1964 to newly engaged Frances Catherine “Cathy” Wood, an exotic dancer, and David Darlington, a stock car racer and mechanic. However, they placed her for adoption soon after, with Melissa then finding a home with actor Peter Gilbert and his wife Barbara Crane.

Melissa met her biological father later in life, though her mother had sadly passed away by then. However, she shared with her nearly 400k followers on Instagram on Tuesday, May 26 that she had found out that her biological father’s middle name was actually “Manly,” aka the name her character in Little House, Laura Ingalls Wilder, gave to her husband Almanzo Wilder.

“Thank you to my fifth cousin, @harleesco for being such a stalwart researcher,” she captioned her post. “I also learned that my birth mother, Frances Catherineanne Wood (Cathy), was born on April 26, 1935. My mother, Barbara Gilbert-Cowan was born on April 26, 1936!!!!!!”

Melissa then added further context about her slow return to social media in the wake of her husband’s controversy, wherein she’d turned off the comments for a majority of her previous posts. “I’m going to turn comments back on for this one.”

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“It’s just too coincidental and there might be other birth relatives out there who see it. If things get weird, or nasty, I’ll turn them off again but I know there are so many people out there with similar stories and experiences. I’m compelled to share mine and want, very much, to hear yours.”

She added further info in her follow-up post shared the next day, with more research from her cousin. “This was part of my birth mom, Cathy’s, engagement announcement to her first husband, a man named Leslie R Mullins,” Melissa wrote. 

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“I’m guessing he is the father of my three older half siblings who I am now one teeny step closer to finding. Anyway, there’s even more synchronicity here…she was a performer who started as a child!”

“She was 3 1/2 at her first professional performance,” she continued. “I was two when I did my first commercial. Was I ever born with the right set of genes and then adopted by the exactly perfect family. This is so amazing.”

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Melissa even added hashtags to her posts which read “lucky me” and “there are no coincidences,” also tagging the Little House official pages, with fans sharing their own similar family experiences to match.