Two girls who jokingly told people they were sisters after they had met while working together at a New Haven, Connecticut restaurant found out years later they are actually biological sisters.
According to CNN, Cassandra Madison, 32, and Julia Tinetti, 31, worked together at The Russian Lady in 2013 and found they had a lot in common. Both women were adopted from the Dominican Republic as babies and favored in appearances so much so customers and coworkers would mix them up.
They also discovered they had Dominican flag tattoos, which made them start talking, and they soon became fast friends, the news outlet reported.
“We hit it off right away. There was no trying to force a friendship or anything,” Madison told CNN. “Our personalities are very similar, so it was very easy for us to just start hanging out.”
“We had an event that we went to that we dressed alike — our socks matched, our sneakers matched, our sunglasses matched our shorts were black — she made us tank tops that said that she was the big sister and I was the little sister,” Tinetti said. “We kind of just went with it like as a joke. It was not serious at all.”
The women looked into their adoption paperwork to see if they were biologically connected, but the forms said they had different mothers.
“So we said, ‘OK, never mind, forget it, then we’re not,’ and we just moved on with our lives,” Madison said. “But we still played into us being sisters even though we knew that we weren’t. Well, we thought we weren’t.”
In 2015, Madison moved to Virginia Beach, Virginia but the two kept in touch. She was always intrigued to know about her biological parents, and in 2018 her adoptive mother gave her DNA test for Christmas.
She eventually met her dad and other family members but learned her mother had died that same year. There were seven other kids in her family.
When Madison and Tinetti reconnected in 2020, they realized that something wasn’t right about their paperwork. Tinetti and her best friend Molly, who was also adopted from the DR, had stayed in touch over the years. They learned that Molly’s adoption papers said that she and Madison had the same mothers, but a DNA test confirmed they were distant cousins.
When Madison talked to her father, he informed her that they had given up another daughter for adoption.
“And I’m like, ‘Why would you not tell me this?’ And he’s just like ‘I’m sorry. It was just a very difficult time in our lives, and your mom and I, we don’t like to talk about it,'” Madison said.
That is when she went to Virginia to have Tinetti take a DNA test, which she quickly agreed to take despite having no interest in learning about her biological roots.
“I had a great family growing up, I got a good education, I didn’t feel like I was missing anything in my life,” Tinetti said. “I was happy with the life that I had. I didn’t feel the need to do it.”
The results came in in late January, revealing they were indeed sisters.
“I was like, ‘This is it,’ and I waited for probably like 10 minutes before I even opened it because I was trying to prepare myself for what was going to be there,” Tinetti said.
Tinetti has since had video chats with her biological father and her siblings and hopes to go to the Dominican Republic to meet them in person.
“It was like seeing myself in these people,” she said. “It’s like, ‘OK, well, now I know where I come from,’ you know what I mean? It has always been a mystery for me.”
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