Throughout this month, I will be sharing fun family reunion activities for all ages. Last week, I shared how to use Google Slides to create a family reunion quiz. This week, my activity idea is a simple one: create a look-alike contest at your next reunion!

A Look-Alike Contest, 3 Ways

For each contest: make a poster explaining the contest, with example photos. Have family members take snapshots of the look-alikes and send them to the person running the contest. Display the entries at the reunion, either in print or digital format. Vote on the winners, and give out prizes!!

1. Current Living Cousins: Does your family have the “Jones look”? Or a particular feature that you can identify members of the family by? Do you have cousins that look more like twins? This contest would require very little prep for the contest organizer; everyone at the reunion just has to look for their “twin” among the group. (You can decide what your rule would be about actual twins. :)) The winners of this contest might be the cousins that look most similar, or best represent the “family look”. Can you imagine the deeper connection that cousins or second-cousins might feel when they realize how much they look like one another?
2. Next Generation: In this contest, the younger generation (maybe 18 and under), can see how much they look like parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents at a similar age. For this contest, the organizer would round up childhood pictures from the adult generations attending the reunion and display them at the event. Maybe one cousin will look like his grandpa as a child, while another teen looks like her aunt. This contest lends itself to deeper connections among the living generations of the family at the reunion.
3. Ancestor Doppelganger: The third contest, and the one we tried at our recent reunion, is a look-alike contest with earlier generations of ancestors, the ones many at the reunion never knew. The organizer can gather a number of photos of previous generations from the family and print them to display at the reunion. To make the contest even more fun, the organizer could provide props or costumes that resemble the items seen in the old photos. Family members can dress up and pose like the ancestor they look like. Do you think family members might wish to know more about an ancestor when they look so much like them?

The winner of our look-alike contest!

Try a Look-Alike Contest at your next reunion! I’d love to hear how it went.

Cordial Genealogy Wishes,

Melissa