Friends Since Childhood, Sisters by DNA: An Adoption Reunion Decades in the Making

Two women adopted separately from Indian orphanages to the Netherlands have discovered through a DNA test that they are biological sisters, more than four decades after their adoptions separated them as infants.

Meena Geltink, 43, and Minal Tijssen, 44, were both left as infants at orphanages in India before being adopted into different families in the Netherlands, roughly 100 miles apart (NBC News). The two grew up in separate adoptive households, each without knowledge of the other's existence, until their paths crossed and they became childhood friends.

That friendship preceded the genetic discovery. Geltink and Tijssen knew each other socially in the Netherlands well before any DNA testing took place (NDTV). The revelation that they shared a biological parent came only when a DNA test confirmed what neither had suspected: they were not merely friends, but sisters (Times of India).

Reuters, which reported the story on August 12, 2026, framed the discovery through Geltink's own words: the finding was, for her, "like a missing puzzle piece has been found" (Reuters). The phrase captures something specific about this kind of reunion. The search was not for a missing person in the usual sense, but for a missing relationship that was hiding in plain sight. Geltink and Tijssen were already friends. The DNA test did not introduce them to each other; it redefined what they already had.

The broader context here is the rise of commercial DNA testing. Over the past decade and a half, direct-to-consumer genetic tests have created a category of reunions that adoption records alone could not produce. India was a significant source country for intercountry adoption through the late twentieth century, and many adoptees from that era grew up with limited or no access to original birth records, orphanage intake documents, or any trace of biological family. DNA databases have functioned as a kind of parallel archive in cases where institutional records are absent, incomplete, or off limits.

What makes Geltink and Tijssen's case distinctive is not the technology but the shape of the reunion. Most DNA-mediated adoptee reunions connect individuals who had no prior relationship. Here, the two women had already formed a bond through ordinary social proximity in the Netherlands. The genetic test did not create a connection from nothing. It reclassified an existing one, turning a friendship into a sibling relationship and giving a biological frame to a social tie that had already been built over years.

The 100-mile distance between their adoptive homes is modest by the standards of a country where intercountry adoptees are dispersed across receiving families nationwide. That two Indian-born adoptees placed in separate Dutch households within that range would encounter each other, form a friendship, and later discover shared parentage is the kind of convergence that invites a question worth asking: how many similar reunions may remain unrealized simply because the individuals involved have not yet been tested, or have been tested but not matched?

The story also points to a structural feature of transnational adoption from the period in which Geltink and Tijssen were adopted: siblings could be, and were, separated by the process itself. Different orphanages, different adoption agencies, different receiving countries, and different timelines meant that biological siblings placed for adoption could end up in households that had no connection to each other and no mechanism for post-placement contact. In this instance, both sisters were sent to the same receiving country and placed within drivable distance. The separation was not geographic but informational: neither family knew the other existed.

Geltink and Tijssen's discovery was possible because a DNA test closed the informational gap that institutional separation had opened. Whether other siblings separated under similar circumstances will have the same opportunity depends, in practical terms, on whether they enter the same genetic databases and whether the matches are recognized for what they are.