Two sisters born 18 months apart in the early 1960s and both adopted as babies met in a cheerful reunion Tuesday at Trudeau airport.
Helen Zolna-Abrams and Adonna Jacobs were born to the same set of parents at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. After their adoptions, both grew up not knowing the other existed.
Zolna-Abrams, who knew she was adopted, said she eventually started wondering about her biological family.
“My mother passed away in 2004, so I thought, you know, maybe now is the time to snoop around. It won't be hurting anybody,” she said.
With the support of her husband, she went on a website called Ancestry.com which supplies DNA kits to people looking for their roots.
The results were almost immediate. Zolna-Abrams had a match with somebody who used the same service.
“Sure enough, I have a full-blood sister,” she said.
That sister is Jacobs, who lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
What followed were weeks of phone calls, emails, and a wealth of emotions. Pictures showed an eerie resemblance between the two.
“I'm over-the-moon happy. This is so amazing. It's amazing. It's like a dream that I haven't woken up from,” said Zolna-Abrams.
Her sister acquired a passport and flew to Montreal, while she welcomed her surrounded by family – and plenty of tissues.
Jacobs said she now wants to build the kind of relationship she always wished to have with the sister she never knew she had.
“We're going to have a pajama party,” she said. “We're going to do each other's hair. We're going to do each other's nails and everything else girls do,” she said.
