Sisters separated at birth and raised thousands of miles apart finally meet 39 years later

Two sisters and raised thousands of miles apart have been reunited for the first time.

South Korean siblings Darragh Hannan and Jee Won Ha, who were adopted in the US and Belgium respectively, met each other after discovering they were family through the MyHeritage

Jee Won, who was born in 1985, now has a stable life with her family in Belgium, but this wasn't always the case. Her first adoptive parents, from Korea, divorced in 1987 and she was then taken in by a Belgian family who she accused of committing a number of offences, including "identity theft, child smuggling and child trafficking".

The family are said to have used falsified documents to adopt seven Cambodian children. “Identity theft, child smuggling, child trafficking... It seems like my parents were [a] big role in it, so they organised it, and they did it themselves,” Jee Won said.

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The Korea Herald reported how the pair were reunited thanks to a simple email from Jee Won to Darragh, which lead to the pair divulging emotional details of their time both together and apart. A video of their reunion showed the two women running towards each other and embracing at the airport.

Darragh kicked off their path to reunion back in 2018 when she took a DNA test on an ancestry tracing website. At first, only distant relatives showed up but in 2024 she got a shock notification. Earlier that same year, Jee Won and her brother took a similar test and was stunned to discover she had a full biological sister.

“I was completely in shock. I drank a little bit before I could write an email,” Jee Won said. "We’ve seen reunions happen on TV, and we hear stories of reunions and how happy they are," Darragh added. “We always see that part, but we never see the confusion and the questioning and all of the big feelings that happen after the big moment. What comes next? What’s ‘our’ after the big moment? What does that look like for us?”

Jee Won added: “Finding each other is not only the one big happy thought. It’s also the confusion and the sadness of all the things that you missed together.” The pair are planning to visit Korea together with the hopes of tracking down their birth parents, and learning more about their shared identities.