Cousins who look alike

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

The thread about children inheriting political attitudes got me thinking about this.

Any dopers with cousins who look more like you than your siblings? My father’s brother has four children (actually five, but one is adopted), and three of them look like three peas in a pod. They also look like their father, except one has green eyes instead of brown. One kid favors his mother, and has straight, light-brown hair.

The three who look like their father also look like me. My oldest cousin and I were frequently mistaken for sisters, and sometimes even twins. We’re only about 13 months apart. My youngest cousin is 13 years younger than I am, and when I was in high school (and looked a few years older), if I’d take her to the park, or a movie, or something by myself, people thought she was my daughter.

We have two cousins at the preschool where I work, who are a boy and girl, and the same age. One is blonde, while one is a red-head, but if you shaved their hair, and put them in something neutral, like sweats, I don’t think you could tell them apart. They both have these ice-blue eyes right out of a Swedish folk tale, round faces, and natural smiles. They look more alike than either set of actual boy-girl twins we have.

Now, my grandmother had (my grandmother was very recently deceased, just short of her 99th birthday) a freaking Patty-and-Cathy-Lane identical twin. They were about 25 years apart in ago, otherwise, I don’t think you could tell them apart. It was eerie. I didn’t meet this cousin until I was 10, and went to Slovakia for the first time, and I didn’t see them together until I went to Slovakia with my grandmother when I was 18, but it blew my mind.

My brother, who does not look like me, looks like a second cousin on my mother’s side of the family. They both look like Jeff Goldblum, only with lighter hair, and less of a confused expression. It’s kind of funny, because my mother has an older twin brother and sister, who look nothing alike, but my mother looks like her brother, enough that when they were older, people were always assuming my mother was the twin, especially by the time she was 15 and taller than her older sister. My mother’s sister looked like a changling. The second cousin who looks like my brother is the grandson of the changling.

Anyone else got weird stories of lookalike relatives who are not immediate family, or other types of anecdotes?

2

My youngest cousin, who is about 19 years my junior looks a lot like me, we both resemble our grandfather. Ironically, if you look at pictures of me when I was his age, there is less resemblance, my hair has straightened and darkened since then, his has always been that way.

3

The cousins I know who look so much alike are double first cousins – their parents are a brother and sister who married a brother and sister. Each family has four kids – but the two that are strikingly similar are these two cousins (I mean, the cousins look more alike than either one looks like her own siblings).

4

For several generations, men in Dad’s family had only two face types to choose from. Him, his oldest brother, half their paternal cousins, half their paternal uncles and their paternal grandfather all had one look; the other half of the men had a different look but again repeated a lot. This second batch would often wear facial hair and that made a big difference, but it was kind of scary when Uncle Javier shaved (after a lifetime of seeing him bearded) and everybody’s reaction was “holy shit, you look so much like your brother Iñaki and your father it’s uncanny!.. oh, and about half your cousins… daaaaamn.”

The last two generations haven’t been so cloney, but I have two cousins who could be confused easily if their body language wasn’t so different. Bill looks like he’s about to jump through the nearest ceiling, Gee like he’s the offspring of some wet noodles and a different batch of wet noodles.

My brother Ed has too many brothers.

One of his closest friends from school was the eldest of three brothers; all four get mistaken for each other. No known relationship between our family tree and theirs, but given that we’re all “from hereabouts”, common ancestors somewhere wouldn’t be terribly surprising.

I have a picture of Ed taken at summer camp, with two other guys the same age: we know which one is which by looking at the clothes. Looking so similar, they all even wore the exact same model of glasses. One is known to be a very distant relation (his paternal grandfather and our paternal grandmother were second cousins), no known relationship to the other one.

5

My brother and my cousin look a lot alike and they look like mom’s dad.

Mom’s parents’ wedding picture looks like a picture of mom and my brother. Creepy as heck.

I don’t look much like my brother at all (he’s short and dark and I am tall and fair) but I have the same baby face as a different male cousin on mom’s side.

6

In my family, there’s two second cousins that looked amazingly alike when they were young.

I have a picture of my grandmother next to her cousin as young women and they look like twins.

This stuff happens.

OTOH, as for me and my cousins, the closest is on one side where 3 of us, despite different hair colors, all started to get gray in our beards in the exact same spot. Got a pic of that.

7

I have a cousin who looks more like my dad than I do. Very much so, everybody notices it.

Otherwise, none of my cousins have the slightest resemblance to me.

8

they’re cousins,
Identical cousins and you’ll find,
They laugh alike, they walk alike,
At times they even talk alike -

You can lose your mind,
When cousins are two of a kind.

9

My father was one of 3 brothers. Each of the brothers had 2 kids, each kid is either blond with brown eyes or brown haired with blue eyes. My brother looks like Heather and Heidi, I look like Peter and Lori. <shrug> If my parents hadn’t had a house fire, I could have showed you pictures of Lori and I at the age of 6 looking like twins [I was wearing a red velvet dress with white fluffy trim, Lori was in a green velvet dress with white fluffy trim.]

10

Royal cousins Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, King George V of England, and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia looked quite similar to one another. King George V and Tsar Nicholas II looked nearly identical.

11

This week on Ask Me Another, the lesser cousin (heh) of Wait Wait Don’t Tell me, this was a song-question and at the end one of the hosts was like “is there actually such a thing as identical cousins?” Everyone else was like “no I don’t think so”.

12

There were a lot of identical twins in my high school for some reason. Once the school newspaper decided to do an article about it, and they interviewed a pair of girls with the same last name who sure looked identical. They found out the girls weren’t identical twins, they were double first cousins. (One had a sister who looked nothing like her.)

There were still about a dozen identical twin sets.

13

And here all this time I thought look-alike cousins were b.s. :stuck_out_tongue:

14

There’s a similarity in the faces of the women on my dad’s side. His sisters, while differing some in body shape, all had long foreheads and noses. So do their daugther, and the female children of their brothers. It came from my paternal grandmother.

I met some of the kids of two couples in my town. Their parents, two married couples, were identical twin brothers and identical twin sisters. So genetically speaking, these double first cousins could have been brothers and sisters. They all looked a lot alike.

15

I have a picture of my father and his cousin William taken when they were both about ten years old. I can’t tell which one is my father and which is William, even though I’ve seen plenty of pictures of my father at about that age. I don’t know if they continued to look alike later in life, because we lost touch with that side of the family long before I was born.

16

Further degrees of consanguinity:

My second cousin’s son, we’ll call him Sam, came to visit at one point a few years ago. Sam is around the same age as my son; they are third cousins. My son was away at school at the time.

I brought Sam with me to church one Sunday. Several of my fellow parishioners greeted Sam by my son’s name: “Hey, Ulfsson! Great to see you. How’s school?” My favorite was the woman who stared at Sam, stared at me, shook her head, and said “He looks more like you every day.”

17

I’m going to add to this one of mine. I’ve seen pictures of my middle sister as a toddler, and of my mother at the same age, and they look like the same kid in different clothes. But while they still have a family resemblance, they don’t look so identical.

18

I had three double first cousins. Dede and my sister Maria looked a lot alike when they were kids, despite a four year age difference. When Mom sent Sis’ school pic to her brother in Germany, he wrote her back asking why she sent a pic of her cousin.

I have one first cousin that I resemble. While I’ve always had light hair and she dark, we both have our grandmother’s face and build.

19

I have 17 first cousins, 7 male (all on my father’s side, mom was an only child) and we mostly look alike. Same hair color and style, we are all about 5’ 11"-6’1", same nose and we all have brown eyes. Age ranges from 56 to 79. However, two of us (including me) are adopted. If you look at family reunion pictures, you can’t tell which of us are the adopted ones. On the distaff side, 4 of the girls were all born in 1952. They call themselves the class of 52. They don’t look like each other at all. Go figure.

20

My oldest daughter and my sister’s daughter look very similar, much more like siblings than their actual siblings. The funny thing is that the traits they most have in common are ones inherited from their fathers’ mothers.