Meena Geltink and Minal Tijssen met the way many Indian-born adoptees in the Netherlands do: at a gathering for children adopted from the same country, when they were both 14. They noticed the resemblance immediately, exchanged letters for six years, and jokingly signed off as "Sis" — never suspecting the nickname was literal, according to MyHeritage, the genealogy company that eventually connected them.
Both women were born in Mumbai — Geltink in 1983, adopted at four months by a Belgian-Dutch couple, and Tijssen in 1982, adopted at three and a half months by a family in Made, in the Dutch province of Brabant, after being left outside an orphanage as an infant. The two lost touch after 2011, their teenage correspondence trailing off along with any real expectation that the resemblance was more than coincidence.
Geltink took a consumer DNA test in 2017 but turned up no close matches and largely forgot about the account. The turn came this spring, when Tijssen finally took a DNA test of her own through MyHeritage. The results showed an immediate family match: a 100 percent sibling overlap with the childhood friend she had once called "Sis" in letters.
When I see you, it's like I'm home.
Minal Tijssen, to her sister Meena Geltink
The two reunited in mid-August in the Netherlands, more than three decades after they were separately adopted from the same city roughly 7,800 kilometers away, and more than a decade after they had lost contact assuming they were simply two women who happened to look alike, as Unilad reported.
Their story has since traveled well beyond the Netherlands, picked up by outlets on multiple continents drawn to the particular twist of two people building a real friendship — nickname included — years before a cheek swab confirmed what they had already sensed.
