The Life And Times Of Conjoined Twins Margaret And Mary Gibb
- May 29, 2023
- 5 min read
Updated: Oct 8, 2025
“We were born together, and we shall go together.” — Margaret and Mary Gibb, 1940s interview with a local reporter in Holyoke.
If you’d been walking through a travelling fair in the 1930s, you might have stopped to see two young women seated at a piano, smiling as they played together in perfect rhythm. They were Margaret and Mary Gibb, conjoined twins from Holyoke, Massachusetts, and their performances drew crowds across the United States and Europe.
They weren’t chasing headlines or pity. They were working performers, musicians, and small-town shopkeepers who happened to be joinrs. Their story, unusual as it was, followed a rhythm all its own.
Growing up in Holyoke
Margaret and Mary were born on 20 May 1912 in Holyoke, Massachusetts, to Scottish immigrants James and Margaret Gibb. They also had a younger sister named Dorothy. Holyoke was a booming paper-mill town back then, a place of clattering machines, factory whistles, and close-knit immigrant communities.
When the twins arrived, doctors and local reporters were immediately intrigued. The sisters were joined at the upper chest and shoulder, facing slightly toward each other. Each had their own vital organs and full control of her limbs. Because they were thoracopagus twins, sharing only a small area of tissue, some surgeons believed they might one day be safely separated. But their parents refused. Their mother reportedly told a visiting journalist, “If God made them one, then one they shall stay.”
The Gibbs decided to raise the girls quietly. They hired private tutors instead of sending them to school and kept them away from exhibition shows. The twins grew up learning music and dance at home, eventually teaching themselves to play the piano as a pair, one working the higher keys while the other played the lower.
By their early teens, curiosity about the outside world was setting in. They’d spent most of their childhood indoors, and when they turned fourteen, they decided to head to New York City to see what opportunities the stage might offer.
Life on the stage
In 1920s New York, vaudeville was everywhere — a mix of music, magic, dance, and comedy that filled theatres night after night. Margaret and Mary joined in, performing as “America’s Siamese Twins.” The phrase came from the fame of Chang and Eng Bunker, 19th-century twins from Siam (now Thailand) whose name had become shorthand for conjoined twins in general.
The Gibbs weren’t a sideshow act in the traditional sense. Their performances revolved around music, rhythm, and light humour. They played piano duets, sang, and chatted with audiences. Reviewers described them as polite, engaging, and naturally funny. Crowds came out of curiosity but often left impressed by the coordination of their act.
During the 1930s, they toured widely, across the United States, Paris, Germany, and Switzerland — performing with the Barnum and Cole Brothers Circuses. They travelled by train, performing in theatres and tents across small towns and major cities alike.
In 1929, while performing in New Orleans, Margaret met Carlos Daniel Josefe, a man from Mexico City, and the two became engaged. The story caused a media stir. Papers speculated about whether the twins might finally undergo surgery to allow Margaret to marry.
A surgeon, Dr. Francis P. Weston, was reportedly preparing for a possible operation, but it never happened. Accounts differ, some say the risks were too great, others that the twins themselves decided against it. Either way, they stayed as they were. The engagement ended quietly, and they continued touring for another decade.
Leaving the spotlight
By the early 1940s, the vaudeville circuit had started to fade. Audiences were turning to radio and cinema, and travelling shows were closing down. The Gibbs decided to retire from performing and return home to Holyoke.
In 1942, they opened a small business, the Mary-Margaret Gift Shoppe, on High Street. It sold cards, vases, novelties, and handmade baby clothes. Locals remembered them sitting side by side behind the counter, knitting or chatting with customers. The shop ran successfully for several years before closing in 1949.
After that, they lived quietly. They attended church regularly, watched television, and spent time knitting and reading. They had lived their early years in front of audiences; now they preferred to keep to themselves. When asked once whether they missed performing, one of them replied simply, “We’ve had our applause. Now we like the quiet kind.”
The final years
In 1966, doctors discovered that Margaret had bladder cancer, which soon spread to her lungs. The sisters were advised once again to consider separation, but they declined. The operation was risky even by 1960s standards, and neither wished to live without the other.
On 29 August 1967, Margaret died at the age of 55. Mary followed just two minutes later. The local Holyoke Transcript-Telegram reported, “They came together and went together.”
They were buried in Saint Jerome Cemetery, under a single headstone that reads:
“Margaret and Mary Gibb — Together in Life and Death.”
After the curtain fell
The story of Margaret and Mary Gibb never attracted the same fame as Daisy and Violet Hilton or other twins of their era. They appeared in newspapers and medical journals, but their names gradually slipped from public memory.
Unlike many performers from the sideshow era, the Gibbs had a choice in how they lived and worked. They performed for wages, managed their own bookings, and later built an ordinary life in their hometown. For all the medical curiosity and press fascination, their lives were defined mostly by routine — rehearsals, train rides, and evenings spent knitting in their small flat above the shop.
Today, their story occasionally resurfaces in local histories of Holyoke or in articles about early circus performers. Their photographs, often showing them smiling in matching dresses, appear in archives and medical journals, reminders of a period when science, entertainment, and human curiosity often overlapped.
It’s a small story in the larger history of performance and medicine, but one that hints at how people found work, companionship, and a sense of normal life under circumstances few could imagine.
Sources
Holyoke Transcript-Telegram archives, Holyoke Public Library (1930s–1967).
Springfield Republican newspaper archives, Massachusetts.
Potter, Paul. The Gibb Twins of Holyoke: America’s Siamese Twins. Holyoke History Room, 1989.
Cole Brothers Circus Touring Records, Circus World Museum, Wisconsin.
“Conjoined Twins in History.” Smithsonian Magazine, July 2019.
Blumberg, Jess. “When Conjoined Twins Captivated the Public.” National Geographic History, February 2020.
“The Hilton Sisters: Joined for Life.” The Guardian, October 2007.
Massachusetts Vital Records (Birth and Death Certificates for Margaret and Mary Gibb, 1912–1967).
Medical Archives Journal, “Famous Conjoined Twins of the 20th Century,” Vol. 12, 1995.
Barnum and Cole Brothers Circus promotional brochures, 1930s editions.
