Two women born in India and raised hundreds of miles apart by separate adoptive families in the Netherlands have learned they are biological sisters, about three decades after they first met as teenagers and struck up a friendship neither knew was rooted in blood.
Meena Geltink, 43, and Minal Tijssen, 44, had already spent years calling one another “Sis” as a term of affection before a DNA test this year confirmed they share the same biological mother and father.
The women described their story in accounts published by MyHeritage, the DNA-testing company and Reuters.
Born in Mumbai in 1983, Geltink was adopted at four months old by a Belgian-Dutch couple who worked as teachers. Tijssen, born the year before in 1982, was adopted at three and a half months old by a family in Made, in the Dutch province of Brabant.
Different orphanages. Separate towns. Neither family had any indication that the girls were related.
In mid-August, they met in person in the Netherlands for what both women described as an emotional reunion.
“When I see you, it’s like I’m home,” Geltink told Tijssen, according to Reuters, which documented the reunion.
At 14, in 1996, Tijssen was sent by her parents to a weekend gathering for international adoptees in the Netherlands. The two girls, Reuters later reported, were living about 100 miles apart at the time. During dinner, she noticed a girl staring at her from across the table: Geltink.
The lookalike was striking enough that their friends pulled them into a bathroom to compare their reflections side by side. The same eyes, the same nose, the same smile, the same dark skin — and the same passion for gymnastics.
Years earlier, Geltink had met a stranger during a family camping trip in Austria who mistook her for a girl he knew named Minal. The boy, it turned out, had gone to primary school with Tijssen.
Letters followed for six years. So did the nickname “Sis,” a term the girls used for a bond they could not quite explain.
Without social media to keep them in contact, however, adulthood pulled them in different directions.
By 2011, they had lost touch entirely. Tijssen eventually came to see their old nickname as little more than a story the two of them had invented as teenagers.
Finding their origins proved no easier.
Tijssen returned to the orphanage listed on her Mumbai court papers in 2004 and again in 2025, only to be told there were no records and no mention of her name; staff turned her and her family away both times.
Geltink took a MyHeritage DNA test of her own in 2017, hoping it might lead her to relatives. Months went by without a close match. She eventually stopped checking the account, forgot her password and deleted the app.
It came as a notification in the spring of 2026. Tijssen’s phone alerted her MyHeritage results were ready, and she opened the app to find an entry at the top of her list under “Immediate Family”: “Sœur (Sister): Meena, Netherlands.” MyHeritage’s account of the discovery describes Tijssen’s reaction.
Frozen and trembling, Tijssen struggled to take in what she was seeing. Then came the tears, on her way to pick up her son from soccer practice.
Through Facebook, she sent Geltink a screenshot of the result and asked whether she could recall how the two of them used to call each other sisters — because the DNA app now suggested they might actually be.
Long forgotten was Geltink’s MyHeritage login. Her partner helped her back into the old account and examined the shared centimorgan data before confirming what the test was showing — in his words to her, as she recounted it to MyHeritage: “100% full biological sisters.”
“We were friends before we were sisters,” Tijssen later told Reuters. “We were sisters the whole time, but we didn’t know.”
For Tijssen, the confirmation answered a question she had carried since childhood about where she came from and whether she belonged anywhere at all.
Since the discovery, text messages and video calls have become part of the sisters’ daily lives. They compare memories, mannerisms and tastes they now attribute to shared biology, including a mutual love of the Backstreet Boys dating back to their teenage years.
