How to get sub-categories to display same look as there parents

If you have a single level of subcategories under your main categories, you can just do this:

$category = get_category( $cat );
if( $category->category_parent ):
    $parent = get_cat_name( $category->category_parent );
    echo '<h1>' . $parent . '</h1>';
else:
    echo '<h1>' . $category->cat_name . '</h1>';
endif;