Melissa Gilbert’s Birth Father ‘Knew’ She Was His Daughter from Little House

Melissa Gilbert was a presence in her father’s life longer than she knew.

The actress, 61, opened up about her journey of finding her birth parents on the July 8 episode of Patrick Labyorteaux’s podcast, The Patrick LabyorScheaux. Both adoptees, the Little House on the Prairie alums bonded over their similar experiences and the role their time on the beloved series played in connecting with their biological families.

“When I saw [son Dakota] for the first time, I went, ‘Oh my god,’” Gilbert recalled of her first child, who was born in 1989. “He had my eyebrows and he had my lips, and I’d never seen anyone that looked like me. And then I realized there’s got to be more.”

When she “started searching” for her birth parents, Gilbert began to learn more about their story.

“They were each married to other people and had three children each and ran off together and conceived me on a motorcycle trip in the desert,” she revealed. “Explains a lot. And then they left their spouses for each other and got married after [getting] pregnant with me and moved all the kids in, so I was number seven. So the decision was made to put me up for adoption.”

Like her adoptive parents, Barbara Cowan (née Crane) and Paul Gilbert, who were actors, Gilbert revealed that her biological parents also came from a background in entertainment — her birth mother was an exotic dancer and her birth father was a stock car racer and musician.

“So it was pretty clear that it was in me,” she noted.

When Gilbert called her birth father to introduce herself, she said he realized he knew who she was.

While her birth mom died before she was able to meet her, Gilbert did get in contact with her birth father.

“I didn’t tell him who I was, and then he asked me, ‘Well, who are you? What do you do?’” she shared. “And I said, ‘Well, here’s the thing.’ And I said, ‘Did you ever watch Little House on the Prairie?’ And he said, ‘You’re Laura, aren’t you? I knew it.’ He knew it.”

“He could see,” she added of her character on the show, Laura Ingalls. “And when I met my half siblings, we all look alike. So, you could definitely see it. So, it’s pretty clear.”

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer​​, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.  

Labyorteaux claimed that he heard the same anecdote about his birth mom, who also died before he was able to find her.

“I never met her, but I met her family, who was a step family,” the actor, 59, explained. “She had three kids that she had inherited with the husband that she married. So she had three kids, but they weren’t her biological kids. She only had one biological kid. The father had a lot of them.”

“But they would watch Little House and when I would show up on Little House, because of my eyes, they would go, ‘Oh, that’s probably your kid,’” he noted. “And they would make fun of her like that. Yeah, they were right.”