Hereditary Instincts-Twins.

[wrjones]

As a general rule I always enter in notes in my Tree occurences of Twins where proven.

Talking generally though,would people say in hereditary terms that Twins were more likely on purely male to male lines,or has anyone noticed instances where female descendants of lines have also had twins?

Regards
William Russell Jones.

[GrahamSimons]

There is interesting material here on the Multiple Births Canada website. I was fascinated by your post and thought that trying to find some science studies would answer our puzzle. I would think that few RootsChatters have enough solid data in their researches to answer this very well, fascinating though the exploration of family trees for this purpose is.

http://www.multiplebirthscanada.org/english/documents/FS-BiologyofMultiples_FINAL.pdf

I've extracted these few lines from the document:

Are multiples hereditary?
Yes. If you have a family history of spontaneous DZ multiples on your mother’s or your maternal grandmother’s side, you have an increased chance of conceiving multiples.
There is also recent evidence to suggest that MZ twinning may be inherited in certain families.
It is a myth that twins typically skip a generation. Many multiples themselves have multiples.

[MZ twins are often called identical; DZ non-identical]

Hope this is of interest

[wrjones]

Thanks for the link.Speaking from my own research as more records have become available,my Greatx5-Grandfather born in 1752 of a set of twins,married in 1774 and was himself the father of twins born in 1787.

Regards
William Russell Jones.

[LizzieW]

My gran had 2 sets of twins, one was 2 girls but whether they were identical is not known as one of them died at birth.  The other set was my dad and his twin sister.  There are no other twins in the family either before or since my gran's twins.

Lizzie

ps.  One of my daughter in law's mother is a twin, she had an identical twin sister, but neither d.i.l or either of her 2 sisters has had twins.

[Gaille]

my gt-gt-gt grandmother had 2 sets of male/female twins (proven from church records) , (plus 11 more children!) and i think possibly 1 more set i havent proven yet.

Her daughter (my gt-gt grandma)  had no sets of twins, ............. but several of her other children had what i suspect may have been twin births - but they re-used names so much i cant tell with some of them!
2 of her grandsons (my grandmas brothers) had twins - both single sex twins
out of my parents generation there have been more sets
and of my own generation, 2 sets of twins, 1 of which was a male/female pair.

time will tell of the next generation!

Think its fair to say Twins are in my genes!

Gaille

[busybod]

Think its fair to say that mine is a "twin" family.  My Grandmother gave birth to twins (boy and a girl) around 1920, but the boy was either stillborn or died shortly after birth.  Two of her daughters had twins, so I have two sets of twin cousins.  I have two cousins who are also married to twins, one of whom was carrying twins but miscarried one.   I am still trying to find out where it all originated before my Grandmother.

Busybod

[Alexander.]

I have an ancestor who gave birth to three sets of twins. However, there is no history of twins in either her or her husband's families. One of the twins died at birth, but five went on to marry (and have large families), but none of them had any twins. There were 25+ grandchildren in total, no twins. It must have been some genetic quirk.

On another part of my tree, I have a man, son, and grandson who were all born twins, though no other relatives were.

Alexander

[Deb D]

Years ago when I used to work for an insurance company, they used to provide "Twin Insurance" for expecting parents (cost a small fortune, but it helped out with the financial extras, should twins arrive).  The commonly-held belief, back then, was that twins tended to show up in every second generation.

My OH's mother was a twin, so there was a chance that I would have twins via that side of the family.  My younger brothers were twins, too, ... so there was a chance one of my children would have twins (according to the insurance company's maths).  However, neither has been the case - thankfully!

[Marmalady]

Older mothers are more likely to have twins -- so in the days of large families and child-bearing well into middle age it was more likely that twins would appear somewhere

Nowadays, twins are again becoming common due both to women delaying starting a family till a much older age and also due to IVF treatment