Niamh Shackleton
A pair of twins who were separated as babies had a moving reunion after learning that they were siblings.
In 1964, when Michele Mordkoff and Allison Kanter were five months old, the two girls were adopted by separates families.
Apparently the two families weren't informed that they were sisters after researchers thought it would be best that they were separated so they wouldn't have to compete for the attention of their new families.
Michele and Allison were adopted from Louise Wise Services, which no longer exists.
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As their families weren't informed about the girls being twins, Michele and Allison never knew either. But in 2018, Michele watched CNN's Three Identical Strangers which looked at a set of triplets who were also adopted from Louise Wise Services and separated.
The documentary sparked Michele to look into her DNA and history. Within a few weeks she learnt via Ancestry.com that she had an 'immediate family member' that she didn't know she had, said CNN.
Michele decided to message the person the website told her she was related to, and it turned out that she'd messaged Allison's son. He informed his mother of the message he'd received.
Her son text her: "Mom, there’s someone [contacting] me that said they’re related to you... and you need to look at your birth certificate number right away and tell me what it is."
After finding the certificate, it confirmed that Allison and Michele were twin sisters.
"I was just shocked. I thought someone had assumed my identity," Allison recalled.
"I didn’t know what was happening, and then I read him the numbers - the last four numbers - and he said, 'Mom... she’s your twin sister.'"
Three weeks later and the long-lost siblings reunited face-to-face in New York.
Their emotional meet up was documented by The Atlantic at the time.
Michele and Allison learnt that they were adopted just two days apart from one another.
They both described it as 'crazy' that they were separated and never told about each other's existence.
"It's funny, not that I need you to look like me, but because you do it's more real and more hurtful," Michele said.
"I mean, we totally got screwed out of twin popularity," she went on to joke. "We would have been 'The Twins'."
When they compared their features, the two sisters said they had the same arms and the same 'little girl hands', as well as much, much more.
More investigations into the agency that Michele and Allison were adopted from has found that multiple siblings were split up in the 1960s as part of the same controversial study.