Best Friends For Decades, A DNA Test Later Revealed They Were Sisters (pics)

Two Indian-born women in their 40s, adopted separately as babies and raised near each other in the Netherlands, have now discovered they are biological sisters.

Meena Geltink and Minal Tijssen were adopted from two different orphanages in an Indian city within months of their birth.

They met as teens and became friends. But they lost contact 15 years ago.

Only in 2017 the two women reunited after taking DNA test which revealed that the two were “a 100% match”.

More than four decades ago, somewhere amid the bustling streets of Mumbai, India, two baby girls were born.

Adopted by different families in the Netherlands, Meena Geltink, 43, and Minal Tijssen, 44, grew up mere hours away from each other.

But their paths never crossed until one day in 1996, when as teenagers, they happened to attend an event organized for adoptees in the Netherlands. 

They only met because their friends spotted them first and noticed an uncanny resemblance between the two girls. Not to mention the pair felt an instant connection, Geltink says.

“We spoke, we went to the bathroom, we looked at the mirror, and I saw her, and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, she has my nose and she has my eyes,’” Geltink told As It Happens guest host Saroja Coehlo. “And we laughed about it.”

But the possibility that they could actually be sisters?

“We wished and we talked about it,” Geltink recalled.

The pair exchanged contact information that day, then kept in touch through letters and emails.

But life, as it often does, got in the way. The friends slowly lost touch for nearly three decades.

Eventually, both women started families and Tijssen moved to France.

During those 28 years, Geltink says she joined another adoptee group in the Netherlands for people adopted from India, many of whom had taken MyHeritage DNA tests. In 2017, she decided to give it a shot, too.

“I thought, oh, wow, maybe there is someone out there, some relatives,” she said. “I was just curious about it.”

But it wasn’t until April that the test would change both women’s lives.

Geltink says she was putting her son to bed when she got a Facebook message from Tijssen, who had taken the test this year.

“She said, ‘Hey, do you remember me? I’m Minal. We shared some letters when we were young,’” Geltink recalled. “She said, ‘Maybe we are sisters because I got a DNA match. Is this your profile on MyHeritage?’”

As it turned out, Geltink had also received the same notification from MyHeritage: a 100 per cent probability that she and Tijssen were sisters. 

The test showed they shared 36.5 per cent of their DNA — consistent with the pair being full siblings.