Mimi Gregg, the daughter of a famous soprano and a lifelong advocate for the arts in Haines, always hoped her family would produce another opera singer.

It did, but she never knew. Neither did anyone else until an opera singer living in Florida entered her DNA into an online ancestry database in February 2016. Katie Saunders, 49, said this week she wasn’t looking for long-lost family when she spit into a vial she sent away to ancestry.com.

An adoptee who grew up in Indiana, Saunders said she was just curious about her nationality. As Katherine Baldvinsson, a professional opera singer in the United States and Europe, she was frequently asked about it. For her Nordic name, blond hair and blue eyes, many assumed she was Scandinavian.

“People would ask, and it was awkward… I was just looking to find out what my background was, and if I was Scandinavian,” Saunders said this week.

Turns out she is Mimi’s granddaughter, the daughter of Allan Gregg, and a child born of a high school romance that ended when Allan left Haines for the U.S. Air Force Academy in June 1967.

Katie Saunders, who is meeting 33 relatives at a family reunion in Haines this week, will sing at “Mimi’s Summer Serenade,” a performance Sunday at the Chilkat Center, a building Mimi championed until her death in 2008. Saunders also will sing at the interment of Mimi’s ashes a few hours earlier at Jones Point Cemetery.

That performance, Saunders said, might be one of the more emotional ones of her career.

Eight months after Allan Gregg left Haines, Saunders was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, where her mother had been living at a home for unwed mothers. Saunders was adopted by a school teacher and farmer and raised in nearby, rural Greensburg, Ind. She took to music early, winning a statewide singing competition in seventh grade.

At age 16, Saunders saw the movie “Amadeus” and became interested in opera. She paid for her own voice lessons and won a scholarship to Indiana University’s School of Music. After a two-year internship with the San Francisco Opera, she went to work for opera companies in Germany.

Saunders speaks several languages, plays five instruments and today bills herself as a “classical and Broadway vocalist.”

In an interview this week, Allan Gregg, 68, said he’s sure Saunders is his daughter by then-girlfriend Jennifer Jane Campbell, who went by Jenny DeCamp when she and mother Phyllis DeCamp lived in Haines. (Gregg also sent his saliva to the website, which confirmed that he is Saunders’ father, he said.)

“When I first saw (Katie), I could only see her birth mother, Jenny DeCamp,” Gregg said this week. “Her eyes, hair color and shape of her nose. I just saw Jenny.”

Gregg said he and Jenny DeCamp exchanged letters for a few months after he became an Air Force cadet, then the letters stopped.

“She wrote some letters and then she just dropped off the map,” Gregg said. “It was just one of those things. We were more together for fun than for the long-term.”

Diann Ahrens of Haines was a year ahead of Jenny DeCamp at Haines High School and remembers her. “I’ll tell you what, Jenny was a good-looking gal. I don’t remember her graduating with her class and I don’t remember her ever coming back (to town).”

Phyllis DeCamp married Don Krake, a local man, then left town a few years later.

Saunders’ connection to the Gregg family – made in May 2016 – came through Janice Moerschel of Spokane, Wash., Allan Gregg’s first cousin. Moerschel, a genealogy buff, had submitted her own DNA to ancestry.com. She was surprised to learn of a cousin relationship to a woman in Florida, as she thought she knew all the Gregg family relatives.

She and Saunders started emailing. “Janice reached out, saying ‘Who are you?’ Saunders recalled. “I said, ‘I’m adopted, but this is what I know.’”

Before submitting her DNA, Saunders had researched the identity of her birth mother, starting with the Indianapolis Children’s Bureau, her adoption agency. Her original birth certificate, stamped “illegitimate,” identified her only as “Baby Campbell” and identified her mother as Jennifer Jane Campbell. No father’s name was listed.

But a social worker’s notes in the adoption papers provided clues, including that the infant’s father was at the Air Force Academy, that he had three siblings, and that the two oldest had attended art school, Saunders said.

For Moerschel, the Air Force Academy link was the clincher.

She phoned her cousin Allan and told him of the connections. “She was kind of dancing around it,” Gregg said. “I finally said, ‘Janice, are you telling me I have a daughter?’”

Gregg phoned Saunders. “I couldn’t wait,” he said. “We talked about an hour, (but) it was still a cautious conversation. I think we both didn’t want to burden the other one. There’s no game plan, no rule book for this kind of thing.”

Saunders was planning a trip to Indiana to see her adoptive parents. Gregg, who lives near Detroit, Mich., arranged to meet her in Carmel, Ind., on May 20, 2016.

They went to a restaurant and talked for five hours. As they talked, they identified some common threads other than opera. He’s a private pilot. She took flying lessons. They like the same foods.

Gregg said Saunders also has the petite build of Madame Regina Vicarino, his grandmother, a famous opera singer who toured the United States and Europe in the early 1900s. The San Francisco Daily Times described Vicarino as having “pleasing looks, a very graceful bearing, considerable dramatic talent and a voice of rare quality.”

“It’s funny, the power of genetics,” Gregg said. “It’s amazing. It’s not just nurture. What’s in our nature is very powerful.”

Saunders said learning of her ancestry and reuniting with her birth father has been surreal. “When I met him, there was an immediate connection that I can’t explain… It’s overwhelming if I think about it, so I’m just trying to take it as it comes. It’s cool. (The Greggs) are such an awesome family. In some ways, it makes so much sense. I feel comfortable. I fit in. It’s not like meeting strangers.”

Gregg and Saunders each say their families have been accepting of their new family expansions. Saunders recently performed in Ketchikan with Allan’s sister K.A. Gregg, who leads a women’s chorus there. Allan Gregg, recently divorced, has two grown children in the Lower 48.

Saunders is married and has a 24-year-old daughter she said pushed her to investigate her ancestry.

“They’re thrilled for me,” Saunders said. “(Allan) is not a threat. It’s not like he’s going to replace anybody. He’s an addition.”

Gregg and Saunders have made attempts to locate Jenny DeCamp, but have only a name to go on. A search firm Saunders hired came up with the address of a woman in Loveland, Ohio, but letters Gregg mailed there were returned by the postal service unopened. Gregg traveled to Loveland in April and knocked on the door there, but no one answered.

“I don’t know if that was her,” Gregg said. Without a social security number or a birth date, the search firm has few leads.

Gregg and Saunders have seen each other at least once a month since reuniting. He takes her flying and helps move her musical equipment between shows. “He’s my roadie,” she joked.

“That’s the advantage of teenage parents. You can still do things together with your kids,” Gregg said.

“I feel lucky,” Saunders said, sitting on a sofa this week in Mimi’s house on Officer’s Row.

“I feel pretty damned lucky,” Gregg responded.