SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO : Seven Meet Sister They Never Knew

Those in the Nonaca family’s small welcoming party said they had no doubt that the woman running through the airport corridor toward them Wednesday was their newly found half-sister.

Like all the earlier events that eventually united their family with this woman, who has lived her life on the other side of the globe, mutual instinct, they say, guided the way.

It has been nearly one year since their father’s accidental death last Christmas Eve, and the seven siblings and their mother say it is a miracle that has brought them together with Robyn Johnson, their father’s first daughter and a woman they never knew existed until last spring.

“I believe that there’s a time for everything,” said Johnson, 44, of Queensland, Australia, who learned she was adopted when she was 26 years old. “I’m sad and sorry because I wanted to meet my father, but he’s given me a family, and that’s a precious gift.”

Johnson’s adopted parents are actually her real aunt and uncle, who were unable to have children of their own.

Her mother was Valarie Johnson, an Australian, and her father was Jose Nonaca, a Texan more than 10 years older than Valarie who was stationed in the South Pacific during World War II. Although he proposed marriage to her, her parents forbade it.

When Jose later married Isabel, he told her about Valarie and their child. But the Nonacas, married 43 years, never told their own seven children and never knew for themselves whether the child was a boy or girl.

Ed Nonaca, 37, of San Juan Capistrano, says at first he and his brothers and sisters were skeptical when Robyn wrote to them in search of her real father last April. Their father had just died, and they thought it might be some sort of practical joke.

But he says he and his sister Sylvia Porter had a feeling she was telling the truth.

“She only wants a family, to know about her brothers and sisters,” said Porter, 40, recalling her first reactions to the stranger’s inquiry.

So Ed Nonaca wrote back, and the family then received another letter with photos of their father and his girlfriend that matched photos they had in his war album.

Eventually they decided to invite Robyn to spend Christmas with them, Jose Nonaca’s favorite time of year.

“It seemed like something was guiding her,” Porter said. “. . . She had the strong urge to find her father. After she started, it just went like that,” she said, snapping her fingers.

Robyn Johnson agreed. In late 1987, after numerous failed attempts to contact the person whose name she had been was told was her father’s, she had given up.

“I thought, ‘Well, I’ll never get to know anything about my dad. I’ll just leave it and go on with my life.’ But then I woke up one morning, and from that minute on, everything just fell into a little pattern,” she said.

Robyn and her husband, Noel Johnson, met the Nonacas Wednesday at Los Angeles International Airport.

“I feel I’m a complete person now,” she said. “I’ve found the other part of me.”