Meena Gelthink and Minal Tijssen, who are now 43 and 44 years old, met in the Netherlands in August after a DNA test showed that they were biological sisters. Both women of Indian origin were adopted as infants by different Dutch families.
They were born in the early 1980s and were adopted from two different orphanages in Mumbai, in western India. As teenagers, they first met at a gathering organized by the adoption agency.
Back then, their friends noticed their striking resemblance, and the girls themselves exchanged phone numbers and addresses and corresponded for several years, calling each other sisters. Then contact was lost for about 15 years: Minal moved to France, and Meena, after the birth of her first child, focused on her family.
In 2017, Meena took a DNA test but found no matches and later deleted the app. On May 20, she received a message from Minal on Facebook reminding her of their meeting and including a photo of the test result that Minal had taken in April during a trip to visit her parents in the Netherlands.
After logging back into the app, Meena saw a “100% match”, which confirmed that they shared the same biological father and mother. In 2003, when she was 19, she had already traveled with her parents and a brother adopted from Goa to an orphanage in Mumbai and spent two weeks trying to find information about her biological parents, but the orphanage did not disclose any details.
After their August meeting, the women call each other regularly and introduce one another to their spouses, children, brothers, and parents. Meena said it felt like coming home, and Minal said they had been friends even before they learned they were related; now they want to travel to India together.
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