She marked the day each year by baking a cake and softly humming “Happy birthday” to herself, so her sons never heard.

Meanwhile, the cake had frosting on it but nothing else. No swirls or stripes or flowers or candles, and certainly nothing about a particular person’s birthday. Nothing that might stir up curiosity among the boys. Whose birthday is it, mom?

That’s the way Genevieve Woodward wanted it. The answer had to wait. At least until her sons were old enough to grasp the fact that they had a sister somewhere on this planet. A half-sister, really, but the family doesn’t like that word.

Her name is Nicole Claypool. She’s married and has a son. She’s 55, and that’s how long it had been since Woodward had seen her, before a reunion last summer thanks to 23andMe, the genetic home testing kit that’s relinking family trees across the world.

As luck would have it, Claypool lives less than 15 miles away from Concord, in Hooksett. She was raised there by her adoptive parents.

They met for the first time in August, at the Puritan Backroom in Manchester. The chemistry was quick. So were the tears. Their eyes connected while Woodward sat in the waiting area.

“I knew it was her,” Woodward said. “I had seen pictures on Facebook.”

“Photos didn’t matter,” Claypool said. “I just walked in and knew it was her. I was bawling.”

They’ve been playing catch-up ever since. They were attached at the hip this week, sinking into a plush couch at the Bonneville car dealership, giggling like school girls who’d known each other forever.

“We have so many things in common,” the mother said with a smile.

They had a difference that was apparent quickly. Claypool was shy. Woodward moved at warp speed, and she had plenty to say.

Once her three sons came of age, at different times, they learned about the hush-hush nature of their mom’s early life. Those cakes all those years, always on Nov. 15? A tribute to Woodward’s daughter, the one she figured she’d never see.

They got the full story, that Woodward was a 17-year-old junior at Bishop Brady High School when she got pregnant with Claypool. They learned about the shame cast on teen moms in the 1960s, and they learned that Woodward was sent by her parents, devout Catholics, to a private school in Boston to hide her pregnancy.

In essence, they stashed her there, never to be seen with a baby bump in the community.

And they learned that Woodward put the baby up for adoption and hadn’t seen her since 1967.

“I saw her two to three times a day in the hospital,” Woodward said. “It was the hardest thing. I kissed her goodbye and I cried and said that this is what I have to do.”

She went back to Brady to finish high school. She had given birth a month earlier and slimmed down by then, enabling her to hide her secret from classmates.

Woodward said she had no one to talk to about what she had experienced. Her friends didn’t know about the adoption, her parents didn’t want to know, and mental health counselors weren’t part of the healing process.

She said she felt lonely.

“You have a child, you give the child for adoption and you’re supposed to forget about it like it never happened,” Woodward said. “There was no one sitting down with me asking how I felt. It was very sad.”

She married, settled in Concord and had three sons. Her husband was in the National Guard. She opened Gen’s Dance Studio and still runs it.

Meanwhile, Claypool settled a few miles down Interstate-93. She said her adoptive parents were great. She married and had a son.

They both grew curious. They each said they asked the adoption agency if they could meet. Woodward says she was told that her daughter didn’t want to see her. Claypool said that she was told the same thing, that Woodward didn’t want to see her.

They revisited the agency through the years and say they were told the same thing, over and over. A serious car crash that nearly killed Claypool and required years of surgeries delayed the pursuit.

Neither ever lost track of the possibilities that lay ahead, however. “I lived in a wonder world,” Woodward said. “What does she look like, where is she, is she happy? I wondered.”

Woodward did not try to contact Claypool until she was 18. She didn’t want to disrupt her childhood. Forty-six years later came the breakthrough.

A member of each family, independent of one another, used 23andMe, and that linked an uncle and a nephew named Sean, right nearby. It soon became apparent that Sean’s mother was likely the daughter given up for adoption in 1967.

That meant Claypool had a biological mom and three half-brothers in her life. And she had no resentment toward her mother for the adoption.

“She was young,” Claypool said. “She was too young.”

Claypool and Woodward looked like good friends more than mother and daughter. Since the reunion, they’ve gone shopping at the mall, walked around Manchester, bought candy and sat at a pool.

They’ll be doing a lot of that in the future.

“We get together each weekend,” Woodward said. “We sit and we talk and we go over everything, what we’ve done, and we still have so much to catch up on.”

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