Shippenville Natives Crowned Queens at Ohio’s Twins Day Festival

Scott Shindledecker

Scott Shindledecker

Published August 16, 2017 4:29 am
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TWINSBURG, Ohio (EYT) — Shippenville natives Ashley and Amber Ganoe (twins) were recently crowned queens at the Twins Day Festival in Ohio.

“We really loved the entire weekend, and we’re still missing it, even though it was more than a week ago,” Ashley said. “We’re still coming down from the high of it.”

Ashley said that she and Amber began attending the festival in Twinsburg in 2004 when they were sophomores in college.

“We had heard about a few years before we actually started to go,” Ashley explained. “A friend in college told me about it, and we’ve been going ever since.”

Ashley said that every year the Twinfest committee accepts applications for the grand royal court. Volunteering at the event is a key component to selection, and the Ganoes have certainly filled the bill. They’ve sold raffle tickets and ran in the 5k race that raised money for melanoma research.

The twins also wrote an essay for the competition and were chosen as queens out of thousands of applicants.

Ganoe Twins 2

“Queens are chosen from the group of twins that are 21 and over, and that’s a pretty sizable group, so to be picked was quite an honor,” Ashley said. “We got to meet so many more twins because of it. At the crowning ceremony, so many twins approached us, so that was a lot of fun.”

The Ganoes got into running because of supporting another set of twins they has befriended at the event — Rich and Robert Strain.

“Rich was running in the Cleveland Marathon a few years ago, and he had a heart attack. Once he recovered, we entered the 5k with him and his brother. They walked that first year back, but we wanted to support him in his recovery,” Ashley said.

Ashley is a Slippery Rock University graduate, while Amber received her degree from Clarion University.

Ashley works at Carlow College in Pittsburgh as the Events and Special Projects Coordinator. She is also the cheerleading coach there.

Amber is an accounts manager at Pittsburgh firm Wilke & Associates, CPAs.

The twins will celebrate a birthday on August 25.

This year’s event was billed as the “TwinCentennial” due to the fact that twins Aaron and Moses Wilcox founded Twinsburg in 1817. Twinfest got its start in 1976.

For more information about the festival, go to https://www.twinsdays.org.

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