Mark Newman and Jerry Levey

Mark Newman and Jerry Levey
COURTESY DR. NANCY L. SEGAL

Other reunited twins separated at birth experience immediate affinities. Mark and Jerry, who were both firefighters when they met in 1985, found one another because Mark’s firehouse colleagues attended a convention where they spotted Jerry. Dr. Segal says they had the most surprising similarities she’s seen: “Both were volunteer firefighters, carried big key rings on their belts, which each had big buckles,” she says. “And both drank only Budweiser beer.”

Advertisement

Sharon Poset and Debbie Mehlman

Sharon Poset and Debbie Mehlman
COURTESY DR. NANCY L. SEGAL

When Debbie was 45 years old, her mother told her for the first time that she’d been adopted and that she had a twin. Debbie hired a private investigator to find her sister, and when they met they found that both had very similar hairstyles and both enjoyed freaking people out by rolling their eyes upward so far that only the whites are exposed, according to Dr. Segal. Both were also devoutly religious – Debbie is Jewish and Sharon is Christian. Some of the most surprising similarities Dr. Segal sees in twins who have grown up separately are “values and attitudes, such as politics, social ideas and religious interests,” she says.

When a family sadly lost one of their identical twins at birth, they donated his tissue to science. Learn about their moving story.

Ann Hunt and Elizabeth Hamel

Ann Hunt and Elizabeth Hamel
COURTESY DR. NANCY L. SEGAL

At age 78, they met for the first time since they’d been separated as babies. Their mother, Alice Lamb, was working as a live-in servant when the twins were born in 1936 in Aldershot, United Kingdom, and she planned to give up both girls for adoption. But Elizabeth had a curvature of the spine, she says, and her mother was told that she wouldn’t be adoptable, so Ann grew up in an adoptive family and never knew about her sister. Elizabeth grew up with their birth mother and was aware of her twin, but didn’t think there was any way to find her. Ann’s adult daughter, Samantha, spent years investigating her mother’s background, and learned about her sister in 2013; the women met in person the following year.

Sign up here to get Reader’s Digest’s favourite stories straight to your inbox!

Source: RD.com

Never miss a deal again - sign up now!

Connect with us: