Put a parent's old photograph next to their grown child at the same age and the family likeness often jumps out in a way it never does across the dinner table. Age is the hidden variable: a father of 55 and a son of 25 look like two different people, but the same father at 25 can look like his son's twin.
The pairs below were shared by their owners on Reddit and Instagram, and each one lines up two relatives at roughly the same stage of life. Some families matched the pose on purpose; others simply found a box of prints and noticed something. Under every picture you will find what the pairing shows and a credit to the person who posted it.
A quick note before scrolling: a striking match is fun, but it is not proof of anything genetic, and a weak match proves nothing either. Haircuts, glasses, camera angle and the choice of which photo to use all push the eye toward similarity. Towards the end we look at what research says about how much of a face is inherited, and how to make a comparison of your own that is fair to both people in it.
Grandparents and grandchildren, decades apart
Grandfather and grandson, both 20
Fifty years separate these two portraits of young men at twenty. The older sepia photo and the modern colour shot share the same strong jaw, the same wire-rimmed glasses and even a similar three-quarter turn of the head, which is part of why the likeness lands so hard.
A grandfather and granddaughter on Instagram
Tanya (@tanya_shatts) on
Instagram user Tanya posted this side-by-side of herself and her grandfather in January 2019. Comparisons that skip a generation are especially surprising, because on average a grandchild inherits only about a quarter of their DNA from each grandparent, and the exact share varies from person to person.
A grandad at about 20 and his grandson at 28
The grandfather's photo looks like a wartime-era portrait, complete with a soft military-style cap and uniform, while his grandson wears a modern suit. The eight-year age gap barely registers: both share the same wide smile and narrow chin.
A grandfather in the mid-1930s, and his grandson today
This poster only discovered the resemblance after finding a 1930s photo of a grandfather who died in 1988. The black-and-white treatment of the modern half helps, but the line of the brow and the slightly raised head are strikingly alike, a reminder that family photo archives can reintroduce relatives we never had the chance to know well.
Fathers and sons at the same age
Father and son in Marine Corps dress blues
Formal military portraits make for unusually fair comparisons. The white cap, dress-blue uniform and straight-on pose are standardised, so almost every difference left between father and son is in the face itself, and here there are very few.
Father and son in their twenties
A curly-haired young man in a striped jersey and a bearded son in a knitted hat stand a generation apart. The original post also compared the pair as first-graders; the adult photos show the same eyebrows and the same intense gaze.
Three generations of men in one frame
A great-grandfather in a wide hat with a holstered belt, a grandfather in a similar hat, and a great-grandson in a suit appear at roughly the same age. Three-generation lineups are rarer than parent-child pairs because the oldest photos are so often lost, which makes this one a small family treasure.
Two bearded faces, one family
The poster joked that their father's genes were "stronger" than their mother's. It is a common way of putting it, but not how inheritance works: each child receives half of their nuclear DNA from each parent, and which visible traits win out depends on many genes acting together, not on one parent overpowering the other.
Father and son, both 14
Teenage school portraits are almost a genre of their own, with the same soft background and the same awkward smile. The feathered 1970s haircut gives away the older photo, but the grin and the eyes are near copies.
Imgur (original poster unknown)
The same pose at Chichén Itzá, 1984 and 2018
Here the son did more than look alike: he returned to El Castillo, the stepped pyramid at Chichén Itzá in Mexico, and copied his father's 1984 pose, white T-shirt and all. Chichén Itzá has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1988, so the backdrop barely changed in 34 years.
Bonus: a father and son recreate a nap, 34 years later
In February 1985 a baby slept on his father's chest. In February 2019 the grown son, now bald and tattooed, lay across his grey-bearded dad in the same way. It is the gentlest picture in the collection and a good example of how a recreated pose can say more about a relationship than about shared features.
Mothers and daughters at the same age
A daughter's costume of her mother
For a costume, this girl dressed as her mother: glasses, top-knot bun and a "#1 Mom" T-shirt. Standing next to each other, the pair look less like a parody and more like the same person photographed twenty-odd years apart.
© sparkleplentylikegma / Reddit
A mother at 21, found by her daughter at 21
P.E.A.C.E. ❤ ☮ (@hippiegypsystyle) on
Instagram user @hippiegypsystyle discovered a photo of her mother taken when she was 21, her own age at the time, and set the two images side by side in 2016. Matching the exact age is the single most useful trick in these comparisons, since faces change fastest in the teens and again after 40.
A parent in 1987 and a daughter in 2017
Thirty years apart, both wave at the camera in a denim jacket with a wide, open smile. Repeating a gesture like this is a classic way of making a then-and-now pair feel deliberate, and it works even when hair colour and texture differ.
Mother and daughter, both 16
Two high-school portraits, one with big late-1980s or early-1990s hair and one with a choker and a blue studio backdrop. The glasses, dark curls and slightly tilted head make the match, while the styling gives each girl her own era.
A daughter and her mother's yearbook photo
The mother's photo comes from a school yearbook, with large rounded glasses and a short bob. Her daughter, in modern frames, wears the same broad smile and round cheeks, and the comparison works despite the very different lighting.
Imgur (original poster unknown)
A daughter and her mother (post removed)
(The Instagram post originally embedded here is no longer available.)
This pairing came from an Instagram post by Jade Tinner, published in May 2018, comparing her with her mother. The post has since been removed, so the picture can no longer be shown, but it belonged to the same idea: a young woman finding her own face in an old family print.
A grandmother and her granddaughter
The grandmother's black-and-white portrait shows a bright, toothy smile and light curls. Her granddaughter's selfie repeats the smile almost exactly. Comparisons that skip a generation are a good reminder that traits can seem to reappear even when a parent in between looks different.
Famous families and new grandparents
Kristina Orbakaitė and her mother, Alla Pugacheva
KRISTINA ORBAKAITE (@orbakaite_k) on
Not every pair here is anonymous. This Instagram post from October 2018 comes from Kristina Orbakaitė, the Russian-Lithuanian singer and actress born in Moscow in 1971, whose mother is the Soviet and Russian pop star Alla Pugacheva. Orbakaitė became a child star in the 1984 film Scarecrow and has had a long music career of her own.
A mother with her baby in 1989, and as a grandmother
Around 1989 a young mother held her infant daughter for a snapshot. Decades later the same woman, now a first-time grandmother, holds her daughter's first child in a similar way. The pairing compares one person with herself, which shows how much of a resemblance can survive thirty years of ageing.
First birthdays in 1986 and 2018
A father's first birthday in 1986 and his son's first birthday in 2018 are staged almost identically: a toddler on a patterned sofa, a plate of treats and big bottles of soft drink on each side. Babies all look somewhat alike, so the deliberate staging does much of the work, and it turns the pair into a family tradition.
How much of a face is inherited?
Quite a lot, but far from all of it. A 2017 study in the journal Genetics, led by Joanne Cole and Richard Spritz, used 3D face scans of children in Tanzania to estimate the heritability of 38 facial measurements. For the measures with significant results, heritability ranged from about 28 to 67 percent, with horizontal measures such as face width slightly more heritable than vertical ones. In other words, genes explain a large share of the variation in face shape, while growth, health, environment and chance account for the rest.
The study also found that many facial traits are genetically linked, so the same sets of genes influence several features at once. That fits what these photos show: a likeness is usually a whole-face impression rather than one matching nose.
Common myths about family resemblance
- "One parent's genes are stronger." Each child gets half of their nuclear DNA from each parent. A child may resemble one side more, but that reflects which gene variants were passed on and how they interact, not a stronger parent.
- "Traits skip a generation." Some recessive traits can appear to skip, but most facial features depend on many genes, so a resemblance to a grandparent is usually just the luck of the shuffle.
- "If we look alike, we must be closely related." Unrelated people can look strikingly similar, and close relatives can look nothing alike. Only a genetic test can settle questions of relatedness.
How to make your own then-and-now pair
Choose two photos taken at the same age, ideally within a year or two. Match the camera angle and distance as closely as you can, because a close phone lens widens the nose and narrows the ears compared with an older camera at arm's length. Copying a pose, outfit or location, as the Chichén Itzá and birthday pairs did, makes the result feel intentional.
Before posting, ask the relatives in the picture whether they are happy for it to be shared, especially children. Then label the files with names, places and dates. Many of the photos here were remarkable only because someone had kept and identified an old print, and a caption written today saves the next generation a lot of guessing.
Sources: Cole et al., "Human Facial Shape and Size Heritability and Genetic Correlations", Genetics, 2017 (NIJ abstract); Wikipedia: Kristina Orbakaitė; UNESCO: Pre-Hispanic City of Chichen-Itza. Photos belong to the Reddit, Imgur and Instagram users credited under each image.
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