Abstract Because of the inevitable impact factors such as pose, expression, lighting and aging on faces, identity veri?cation through faces is still an unsolved problem. Research on biometrics raises an even challenging problem—is it possible to determine the kinship merely based on face images? A critical observation that faces of parents captured while they were young are more alike their children’s compared with images captured when they are old has been revealed by genetics studies. This enlightens us the following research. First, a new kinship database named UB KinFace composed of child, young parent and old parent face images is collected from Internet. Second, an extended transfer subspace learning method is proposed aiming at mitigating the enormous divergence of distributions between children and old parents. The key idea is to utilize an intermediate distribution close to both the source and target distributions to bridge them and reduce the divergence. Naturally the young parent set is suitable for this task. Through this learning process, the large gap between distributions can be signi?cantly reduced and kinship veri?cation problem becomes more discriminative. Experimental results show that our hypothesis on the role of young parents is valid and transfer learning is effective to enhance the veri?cation accuracy.