Twins Reunited After Thirty-Nine Years
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The handshake lasted longer than handshakes usually do. Two men stood facing each other in Ohio in 1979, each of them thirty-nine years old, each of them six feet tall, and neither of them could stop staring, because looking at the other man was almost exactly like looking into a mirror that answered back. They had the same crooked smile. Their voices, when they finally spoke, sounded so alike that family members would later struggle to tell them apart on the telephone. They had been born together in 1939, then separated as babies, and they had not seen each other since.
Before that day ended, the two men would discover that the mirror went far deeper than their faces.
Two cradles in Piqua
Both boys came into the world in Piqua, Ohio, in 1939, identical twins born to a mother who could not keep them. At just four weeks old, each baby was adopted, and the brothers were carried off into separate lives in separate Ohio homes. Neither family knew the other. Neither boy grew up with any idea that a second version of himself was out there eating dinner at another table.
And yet, by a coincidence that still opens this story in textbooks, both sets of adoptive parents independently chose the same name for their new son. Each boy was called James. Each boy shortened it, in the way American boys did, to Jim.
Jim Lewis, in his house
The Jim who would one day go searching grew up as Jim Lewis. At school he settled into a pattern that felt entirely ordinary from the inside: numbers came easily to him and he did well in mathematics, while spelling resisted him and stayed a weakness. At home there was a dog he loved, and the dog’s name, chosen by a boy who knew nothing of any brother, was Toy.
He grew into a tall man, six feet and around 180 pounds. He liked working with his hands, filling spare hours with carpentry, mechanical drawing and careful block lettering. He married young, and his first wife’s name was Linda. The marriage ended in divorce. In time he married again, and his second wife’s name was Betty. He had a son, his first, and he named the boy James Alan. Somewhere along the way he took training in law enforcement and served part-time as a deputy sheriff. From the age of eighteen he suffered from tension headaches, and he bit his fingernails down when he was anxious, a small habit nobody around him thought important.
Jim Springer, in his
The other Jim, Jim Springer, grew up not far away in distance and almost impossibly close in detail. School treated him the same way it had treated his brother: mathematics made sense to him, spelling did not. At home, he too had a dog. His dog was also named Toy.
He grew to the same six feet and the same 180 pounds. He married, and his first wife, a woman who had never met the other Jim or anyone connected to him, was named Linda. That marriage also ended, and he married a second time. His second wife was named Betty. He too had a first son, and he named the boy James Allan, the same name as his brother’s son, spelled with one extra letter. He too had law-enforcement training and worked part-time as a deputy sheriff in Ohio. He too began getting tension headaches at eighteen, gained weight on the same schedule as his brother, and left affectionate little notes around the house for his wife, a romantic habit Jim Lewis’s wife could describe word for word from her own kitchen. On family holidays, both households drove down to Florida and stayed, year after year, on the same three-block stretch of beach near St. Pete Beach, close enough that the two families may have passed each other in the sand without ever knowing.
Neither man chose these parallels. Neither man had even heard the other’s name. Each simply lived his own life, in his own house, with his own dog named Toy, and the life kept quietly rhyming with a life he had never seen.
The meeting, and what poured out
Contact came first through official channels and paperwork, and then, in 1979, the brothers met in person. What followed has been retold so often that the details can sound like a party trick: both men smoked Salem cigarettes, both drank Miller Lite beer, both had suffered severe headaches, both had the same nibbled fingernails that scientists would remark on later. But strip away the storytelling and the documented core, recorded by the University of Minnesota, remains remarkable enough on its own: two men, separated at four weeks old, arriving at middle age with the same height and weight, the same strengths and weaknesses at school, the same kind of work, wives with the same names in the same order, sons with the same name, and a childhood dog with the same name.
For me, the detail that lingers is not the cigarettes or the beer. It is the love notes, the small tender habit both men kept in houses miles apart, as if some part of each brother had been leaving messages for a family he did not know he had.
What science says, and what it does not
The brothers’ story reached Thomas Bouchard Jr., a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, and it changed his career. In 1979 he began the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, and the Jim twins became its first and most famous participants. Over the following two decades, 137 sets of separated twins passed through the laboratory. Each pair endured a week of testing: personality inventories, mental-ability measures, medical examinations, psychiatric interviews, blood work, heart monitors worn for a full day, dental examinations, and, as National Geographic reported, more than 15,000 questions apiece. The study closed in 2000.
Its central finding was careful and, at the time, startling. An identical twin raised apart from his or her twin turned out to have about the same chance of resembling that twin, in personality, interests and attitudes, as a twin raised under the same roof. The researchers concluded that when separated twins match, genes are doing much of the work, and that growing up in the same home matters less, for many traits, than almost everyone had assumed.
Now for the part that honest readers deserve, because the Jim twins are sometimes used to claim more than science allows. Two complete human lives contain thousands upon thousands of facts: meals, songs, streets, purchases, illnesses, jokes. Lay two such lives side by side and some number of matches will appear by pure chance, and storytellers, being human, repeat the matches and quietly drop the far longer list of differences. Sceptics made exactly this point at the time, arguing that the famous coincidences were exaggerated or simply coincidences. Bouchard himself acknowledged that these two particular men were unusually alike even by twin standards, and that separated identical twins are not carbon copies; across the whole study, the real result lived in the statistics of 137 pairs, not in any single pair’s party tricks. One member of his team, Nancy Segal, who met the brothers about a year after their reunion, maintained that their similarity was genuine and not a performance. Both things can be true at once: the parallels were real, and no honest scientist would rest a theory of human nature on two men’s dogs.
That balance is, to my mind, the mature way to hold this story. Genes clearly whispered to both brothers across thirty-nine years of silence. Genes just as clearly did not write their whole lives, because no gene chooses a wife’s name or a brand of beer. Somewhere between those two facts is where psychology still works today.
A family found late
What remains, after the tests and the arguments, is simpler than the science. Two boys were carried out of one room in 1939 into two different lives, and for thirty-nine years each of them was, without knowing it, an only half of something. They found each other too late for childhood, too late for school, too late for weddings, but not too late for everything. They found each other in time to compare headaches and holidays, to laugh at the same jokes in the same voice, and to stand in photographs as what they had been since their first breath: brothers. Some reunions restore what was lost. This one could not do that, and perhaps its honesty about its own limits is why it still moves people. It gave two men back a missing chapter, even if the chapter began on page thirty-nine.
Common questions
Were the Jim twins really identical? Yes. James Lewis and James Springer were identical twins, born in Ohio in 1939 and adopted by different families at four weeks old. They met in person for the first time in 1979, at the age of thirty-nine.
Which similarities are firmly documented? The University of Minnesota records both men being named James by their adoptive parents, each having a childhood dog named Toy, first wives named Linda and second wives named Betty, first sons named James Alan and James Allan, part-time work as deputy sheriffs, strong mathematics and weak spelling, tension headaches beginning at eighteen, and holidays on the same short stretch of Florida beach.
What was the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart? It was a University of Minnesota research programme begun by psychologist Thomas Bouchard Jr. in 1979, the year the Jim twins reunited. It studied 137 sets of twins reared apart, using a week of medical and psychological testing per pair, and was completed in 2000.
Does their story prove that genes control our choices? No. It suggests genes strongly influence traits such as personality, interests and abilities, but researchers and sceptics alike note that two long lives will produce some coincidences by chance, and the popular lists highlight matches while ignoring differences. The study’s real evidence came from all 137 pairs together, not from one pair.
