Cassandra Madison grew up in a small town in Connecticut. She always knew she was adopted from the Dominican Republic; her parents gave her up for adoption because they were poor. Fast-forward to 2013, and she was 24 and working in a restaurant in New Haven. One day, one of her co- workers, Julia, noticed her Dominican Republic flag tattoo. They discovered they were both adopted from there; Julia was 17 months younger. They hit it off and when people told them they looked alike, the friends joked, “That’s because we’re sisters.” When they checked, their birth certificates didn’t confirm their hunch about being related. Cassandra received a 23andMe kit and started trying to find her birth family. She connected with a large family in the Dominican Republic and learned she had 7 siblings. In a plot fit for a movie, eventually one of those siblings was confirmed by DNA testing to be Julia. In October 2022, the two sisters went to the Dominican Republic to meet their family. “I always wanted to find my family, but never in a million years did I think that this would be how it happened. Now, Julia lives in California and I live in Virginia – we’re 2,500 miles apart, but we FaceTime all the time,” said Cassandra.
