One evening this spring, Meena Geltink put her youngest child to bed and sat down on the couch with her partner, ready to have a cup of tea. Then she saw a Facebook message from a childhood friend that would change her life.
“Do you remember me?” wrote the friend, Minal Tijssen. It had been 15 years since the two had seen each other. Ms. Tijssen had included a screenshot from the genealogy website MyHeritage and asked whether Ms. Geltink had also received a notification from them.
Ms. Geltink, who was born in India and adopted by a family in the Netherlands in the 1980s, had been searching for biological family members since 2017, when she sent a DNA sample to MyHeritage. Because so many years had passed without a match, Ms. Geltink had deleted the app a few months earlier.
With shaking hands, she reinstalled it and promptly received the same notification as Ms. Tijssen. There it was: a 100 percent DNA match. Ms. Geltink and Ms. Tijssen had the same parents.
“I burst into tears,” Ms. Geltink said in a phone interview.
Ms. Geltink, 43, and Ms. Tijssen, 44, had first met as teenagers during an organized weekend for adopted children. They instantly struck up a friendship. “I saw her nose, her eyes: Everything looked like me,” Ms. Geltink said.
Growing up in a small Dutch town, where almost everyone was white, Ms. Geltink said she had been “searching for my identity.” Ms. Tijssen was raised less than 100 miles away. Both said they were close to their adopted families and had grown up with a brother.
“I’ve always been surrounded by many people who love me and who took care of me,” Ms. Tijssen told Reuters. “But something inside of me, I’ve always felt very lonely.”
While she had no proof, Ms. Geltink said she had long thought that she and Ms. Tijssen might be related. On a family vacation at a campsite in Austria, Ms. Geltink, then 13, was mistaken for Ms. Tijssen by a Dutch boy who turned out to be Ms. Tijssen’s close friend from home.
Over time, as the sisters entered adulthood, Ms. Geltink and Ms. Tijssen lost touch and had not seen each other for years.
That changed last week, when they had an emotional reunion as sisters in a park in the Dutch city of ’s-Hertogenbosch, together with their partners and children.
“I don’t feel alone anymore,” Ms. Tijssen told Reuters. She declined to be interviewed for this article.
Tens of millions of people have taken consumer DNA tests in recent years and allowed their details to be kept on file. Sibling discoveries are not uncommon, but finding a biological family member in an adoptive country, and so close to home, is extremely rare, experts said.
Ms. Geltink said she did not know the circumstances surrounding her adoption, or Ms. Tijssen’s.
Adoptees often look for biological family members in their countries of origin, which can be difficult because of differences in culture and language, said Jorge de Boer, a therapist in the Netherlands who assists adoptees from other countries.
Cultural gaps between biological relatives hoping to develop relationships are common, especially if they grew up in different countries, said Mr. de Boer, who was raised in the Netherlands after being adopted as a child. “And it’s not always bridgeable just because you happen to be genetically related,” he added.
Tens of thousands of children were brought to the Netherlands through adoption in the 20th century, but international adoption in the country has dwindled over the past two decades.
In 2021, the Netherlands temporarily halted all adoptions from abroad after an investigation found that the government had failed to act on known abuses, including child theft and trafficking, from 1967 to 1998.
In 2024, Dutch lawmakers voted to carefully phase out intercountry adoption over six years. The country’s House of Representatives determined that adoption from other countries “no longer constitutes a sustainable solution for protecting the best interests of children,” the government said when the change was announced.
Melissa Houben, a research and policy coordinator at INEA, a Dutch center for people who have been adopted from other countries, said the case of Ms. Geltink and Ms. Tijssen was extraordinary.
“A lot of people who were adopted grow up without anyone in their vicinity who looks like them,” Ms. Houben said in a phone interview. “Recognizing yourself in another person is something surreal and indescribable.”
Still, she said, such reunions can be laced with a wide range of emotions. “It can be a very beautiful thing, but also very intense,” Ms. Houben said.
For Ms. Geltink, finding her sister felt as if a puzzle piece had fallen into place. But she said she also felt a profound loss.
“A sister is something really wonderful to have,” she said. But all that time, she said, they could have been there for each other.
“We both felt that loneliness in our hearts — like you’re always looking for something, but you don’t know what,” Ms. Geltink said. “We both had that feeling for years.”
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