Meena Geltink and Minal Tijssen began life with remarkably similar mysteries. Both were left at orphanages in India as infants, adopted by different families and raised in the Netherlands. Neither woman knew that the answer to her missing biological history was growing up only about 100 miles away.
In 1996, they attended an event for adopted children. They were teenagers searching for connection among others who understood what it meant to grow up separated from their countries and biological families. Meena and Minal became friends and began corresponding after the event.
Something about the friendship felt natural. In their messages, they jokingly addressed each other as “sis,” never suspecting the word was literally accurate. Without photographs of their birth families or reliable records connecting them, they had no reason to imagine they shared the same biological parents.
Life eventually carried them in different directions. Minal moved to France, built a family with her partner and became a mother of two. Meena remained in the Netherlands and became a mother of three. After years of friendship, the women lost contact for approximately 15 years.
Despite building loving lives, questions about their origins remained. Meena later described carrying an empty space inside her, as though a piece of her identity had always been missing. Both women eventually submitted samples to MyHeritage, hoping DNA might reveal relatives or provide new information.
The test produced a result far more extraordinary than either expected. Their DNA indicated a complete biological sibling match. The teenage friend each had once casually called “sis” was not simply another adoptee with a similar experience—she was her actual sister.
The discovery transformed old memories. Their ease with each other, the playful sibling language and the similarities in their beginnings no longer seemed like coincidences. They had crossed paths decades earlier without knowing that the person standing before them carried the same family history.
On August 11, 2026, Meena and Minal reunited in the Netherlands with full knowledge of their relationship. When Meena looked at her older sister, she described feeling as though she had arrived home. The missing piece she had sensed for years finally had a name and face.
Minal captured their unusual journey simply: they had been friends before they knew they were sisters. Now the women speak every day, rebuilding their relationship with a new understanding and trying to recover what distance and lost records had taken from them.
Their story began with two abandoned babies, continued through a teenage friendship and survived 15 years of silence. DNA delivered the revelation, but life had already brought them together once. Forty years after their births, a joke exchanged between two young friends became the truth: they really were sisters.
Principal facts documented by People. This is an original narrative retelling of the reported events.