Strangers Cassandra Madison And Julia Tinetti Would Joke About Being Sisters After They First Met In 2013

Cassandra Madison and Julia Tenetti used to tell people they were sisters at work

Cassandra Madison and Julia Tinetti find out they’re biological sisters years after they met working at the same restaurant

32-Year-Old Cassandra Madison and 31-Year-Old Julia Tinetti had a lot in common — they were both adopted from the Dominican Republic as babies, they looked enough alike that customers and coworkers mixed them up all the time and they each had Dominican flag tattoos.

“We hit it off right away. There was no trying to force a friendship or anything,” Madison said. “Our personalities are very similar, so it was very easy for us to just start hanging out.”They really leaned into the sisterhood gag and would sometimes wear matching clothes to work.

“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.

Friends bonding over adoption find out they are biological sisters

“At one point, they looked through their adoption paperwork to see if they might really be sisters, but the forms said they had different mothers who lived hours away from each other.

“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.”

Madison moved to Virginia in 2015 and the two stayed in touch over Facebook. She still wanted to meet her biological parents, so her adoptive mother gave her a DNA test kit in 2018. Though her biological mom had died in 2015, she reconnected with her dad and found out she had seven siblings.

In 2020, when Madison and Tinetti reunited, they found out that Tinetti’s adoption papers were wrong. They had been switched with Tinetti’s best friend, Molly, who was also adopted from the Dominican Republic on the same day. The mother was listed as the same on Molly’s forms and Madison’s forms, but Madison’s DNA results revealed that they were cousins. That’s when Madison’s biological dad said they had given up another daughter for adoption.

Madison had Tinetti take a DNA test, which confirmed they were 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 recently connected with her biological father and siblings. “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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