I recently finished reading Mistaken Identity (2008), an extraordinary account of what happened to two families when the wrong daughter was identified in a fatal car crash. Both Laura Van Ryn and Whitney Cerak, students at Taylor University in Indiana, were returning home in a van with 15 other students. A terrible car accident left five of the students dead, one identified as Whitney Cerak. Laura was brought to a hospital for intensive treatment, during which time her family remained constantly at her bedside. But over the five-week course of care, the Van Ryn family eventually realized that the person in the bed was not their daughter, but someone else’s daughter—it was Whitney. It seems that the girls bore a general resemblance to one another, both being blonde and athletically built. One family suddenly grappled with a shocking loss, the other with an unimaginable joy. I thought about this book the other day when I learned of a reunion between identical twins, brought about through another kind of mistaken identity.
The reunion happened in Spain’s Canary Islands. A thirty-five-year-old woman entered a shop and was greeted warmly by the assistant who believed she was her friend. But the assistant was rebuffed. The assistant later called her friend to follow up, only to learn that her friend had never been to the shop that day. The first woman returned several days later, and it was then that the assistant began to question her. A meeting was arranged—and it was clear that the two (the woman and the friend) were identical twins; this was later confirmed by DNA testing. To complicate things further, one of the women said that she had a twin sister, but that she was not identical. Eventually, it was established that one of the twins had been accidentally switched with a non-twin infant in the hospital’s baby nursery. And it was disclosed that the identical twins had been conjoined and successfully separated, although the nature of their physical connection was not reported. Everyone’s life was immeasurably altered by that chance recognition, and the various parties are suing the hospital for millions of dollars.
Of course, this latest case reminded me of a similar one involving twins that I discuss in my book, Indivisible by Two. A set of identical male twins and an unrelated male infant were in foster care together. When two of the infants were moved to a second home, the twins did not go with one another, as planned—instead, one twin and the unrelated male were moved together The twins eventually met through mistaken identity, but it was not until twenty years later. A lawsuit was brought against the agency that had been responsible.
Not all cases of mistaken identity lead to twins, nor do they lead to lawsuits. When I was associated with the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, I encountered many twins who were brought together because someone had confused one for the other. In some cases they knew that they had been born a twin, but in other cases they did not.
Perhaps the most amazing story concerned elderly ladies who had grown up about twenty miles apart from one another, in Scotland. One day, one of them was working in the church that the other one happened to visit. The two recognized themselves in each other and cried with happiness.
I am currently conducting studies of young Chinese female twins separated at birth, an indirect consequence of China’s One-Child Policy. Many of the parents post stories and pictures of their children on adoption websites—and occasionally these postings lead to twin reunions. I was in touch with two families whose daughters looked strikingly alike in unusual ways. I was certain that they were identical twins—until the genetics laboratory informed us that they were unrelated. I mentioned this to a colleague who suggested that perhaps there is a finite (albeit, large) number of facial configurations, such that on rare occasion two people end up looking very much alike. Francois Brunelle, in Montreal, has taken beautiful photographs of some of these unrelated look-alikes, and I have a study underway to see how similar they might be.
Some people do not relish the idea of an identical other—and yet many people envy the closeness and intimacy that comes so naturally to most identical twins. A number of the reunited twins in our study had initial concerns about loss of identity or sense of self, but their worries faded fast once they got to know one another. As investigators, we were impressed with how similar the reared apart identical twins were, but it was never perfect similarity. It also surprises me that most identical twins think that they do not look alike—and yet many must if mistaken identity can bring some together.
We have no idea how many twins are out there now, searching for one another, or how many are living lives as the singletons they believe themselves to be. We will probably never know because some of them will never meet. But we will celebrate with the ones that do.
