Two childhood friends discovered through a DNA test they are biological sisters four decades after being adopted from India.
Meena Geltink, 43, and Minal Tijssen, 44, were left at orphanages in India as infants and adopted into separate Dutch families, growing up roughly 100 miles apart in the Netherlands.
Both women carried feelings of loneliness and a persistent longing for answers about their biological origins, they said.
They first met in 1996 at a gathering for adopted children, where they felt an immediate connection.
People commented on their striking resemblance, and the girls playfully called each other “sis” before exchanging addresses.
They lost touch for 15 years.
In April, Tijssen submitted her DNA to MyHeritage while sitting on her couch in France, where she now lives with her partner and two sons.
Her phone pinged with the results.
“I couldn’t believe it,” she said.
Tijssen had no record of any birth relatives and had felt loved by her adoptive family, yet loneliness lingered throughout her life, she said.
She didn’t initially realize the DNA match was the same teenager she had bonded with 30 years prior.
Then she found Geltink on social media and studied the photos.
The match was 100 percent sibling.
Geltink, a mother of three, had also felt an enduring absence.
“For years, I felt a hole in my heart,” she said.
“It’s like a missing puzzle piece has been found.”
The sisters reunited Tuesday in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands.
They hugged, laughed, and cried together.
They snapped a selfie, both beaming.
“When I see you, it’s like I’m home,” Geltink told Tijssen at the emotional meeting.
Tijssen reflected on their extraordinary path to sisterhood.
“We were friends before we were sisters,” she said.
“We were sisters the whole time, but we didn’t know.”
The pair now spend much of their time talking and messaging, making up for decades apart.
In the viral moment that preceded this week’s reunion, two teenagers at an adopted children’s meet-up in 1996 noticed they looked alike and joked about being sisters. They exchanged addresses and drifted apart. Neither knew their biological family. Neither had any paperwork connecting them to blood relatives. For three decades, they lived parallel lives of quiet searching. Then a consumer DNA kit closed the distance they never knew was zero.
The women plan to continue building their relationship from their homes in the Netherlands and France.