You’ve probably noticed by now that there’s a Guinness World Records title for just about everything.
We have around 65,000 records on our books, covering just about every subject you could possibly imagine, and some you never could have!
Of course, that means that we need the help of some experts from time to time.
As part of our Behind the Scenes series, we’re going to introduce you to some of these very clever individuals who lend us their expertise, whether that be in music, sports, robotics, horticulture, or anything and everything in between.
When it comes to twins, Dr Nancy L. Segal is the woman you want on the case.
Nancy is a professor of psychology and founder and director of the Twin Studies Center at California State University, in Fullerton, USA.
She’s written seven books, with two more set to be published soon, and has an encyclopaedic knowledge of all things twin-related.
Nancy has been working with Guinness World Records since 2014, and together, we’ve collected and confirmed some astonishing twin records, like the first twins born in different countries and the longest separated twins.
“I was very honoured the first time Guinness World Records asked me for help,” Nancy said.
“And then when they asked me again, I was really flattered because it meant I did a good job the first time.”
She added: “Guinness World Records was even started by a pair of identical twins – Ross and Norris McWhirter – so it’s very fitting.”
Nancy is a fraternal twin herself, and it was the differences between her and her sister Anne that first led her into her studies.
“My sister and I look nothing alike,” Nancy told us.
Nancy is shorter than her sister, and while her hair is straight, Anne’s is curly.
Growing up in a New York City apartment building, their neighbours always thought it was another set of sisters – not twins, but two girls who looked strikingly similar – who were the resident twins and not them.
It was during her college years, while majoring in psychology, that Nancy first got into studying twin relationships.
It all came about after she was asked to write a paper about personal adjustment, and she thought back to what it was like being separated from her twin at school, and whether it had been fair for teachers to do that.
Nancy was given an A for the paper, and it’s then that her path to becoming a twin expert was paved.
“I have to say, this has been the most rewarding career, I feel like I’ve been in a candy store every single day,” Nancy said.
Nancy is constantly on the lookout for twin news.
Between her own searches, and the articles other people send to her, Nancy loves finding unusual stories of twins who could be Guinness World Records title holders.
She’ll then bring her findings to us, and we’ll work together to get everything verified and declare them records when we can.
In her work, Nancy has researched twin relationships, how the competitiveness between identical and fraternal twins differs, and even a set of ‘virtual twins’, unrelated children raised together and who replicate twinship without having a genetic link.
The doctor has also studied the personalities of people who look alike but have no relation to each other, and she’s just as fascinated by twins who were raised apart or switched at birth.
One of Nancy’s books, Deliberately Divided, takes an in-depth look at the controversial New York City adoption agency that separated twins and triplets in the 1960s and the study that secretly tracked their development.
The contentious study was also looked into for a documentary called Three Identical Strangers. And Nancy was a big part of a separate BBC documentary, Split At Birth: Twins Divided, about the study after its aftermath.
Nancy has also been studying bi-racial twins, examining how twins born to mixed race parents are treated differently by society because of their skin colour.
As well as writing her own books, Nancy has been part of or worked behind the scenes on several TV shows, movies, plays and books.
And her research findings have even been used in court cases.
Nancy currently has two upcoming books; the first is The Twin Children of the Holocaust: Stolen Childhood and the Will to Survive, which is a moving collection of photos of twins who survived the brutal experiments performed on them at the Auschwitz death camp.
The second, Gay Fathers, Twin Sons: The Citizenship Case that Captured the World, is the story of a US man who married a man from Israel. They welcomed twins together in Canada, both donating sperm to fertilise an egg each.
When returning to the US, only the biological son of the American man was issued a passport, with his twin brother instead being given a tourist visa.
The case almost made it all the way to the Supreme Court, and is an important one to learn from, Nancy says.
That book is set for release in August.
Nancy also likes to correct common misconceptions about twins.
She said: “There’s so much misinformation out there about twins and I feel like I can correct it.
“I actually wrote a book called Twin Mythconceptions, where I put down all these myths and corrected them.
“For example, people think that twins skip a generation, and while that can happen, there’s no rule about it.
“But the problem is that these things end up getting passed around and taken as truth, so I like to try and dispel them.”
If you want to know find out more about how twins Ross and Norris created the first Guinness World Records book, check out this article and the timeline of Guinness World Records here.
Want more? Follow us across our social media channels to stay up-to-date with all things Guinness World Records! You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Snapchat Discover– including our in-depth Curious Casebook series.
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Still not had enough? Follow the link here to buy our latest book, filled to the brim with stories about our amazing record breakers.
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