24 July 2021

Heredity

When I was a young man, I never thought of what I might have inherited from previous generations of my family. I am not talking about money or possessions but about the characteristics that make us who we are. None of us can dissociate ourselves from the people  who went before. I understand that quite clearly now.

Of course, we inherit certain physical characteristics - the colour of our skin, the shape of our eyes, our heights, the shape of our fingers and toes. These are relatively easy things to identify but what's not so easy to discern is the link between one's inner self and the inner selves of previous generations.

I believe that tendencies are frequently inherited. Someone who tends to be jolly  with an optimistic outlook will tend to have children with similarly happy souls. Equally, those who are drawn to the dark well of depression will tend to have youngsters who are pulled that way too. Parents who read books often pass that passion on to their children and rebellious parents will tend to raise rebels. Of course, it goes without saying that there are exceptions to all such rules.

To understand the connections between generations may often require careful deliberation as the layers are peeled back and tangled threads are unravelled.

I think of my two Yorkshire grandfathers - Wilfred Jackson and Philip Theasby. As young men they volunteered to fight for king and country in World War I. They were both at The Battle of the Somme in 1916 and unlike thousands of dead and injured countrymen, they survived the war and came home. It is possible that they may have met or seen each other, not knowing how their future families would be knitted together.

What did Wilfred and Philip see on that terrible battlefield? What did they hear? And more importantly, what did they bring home - hidden in their hearts and in their memories?  How did it affect their marriages and the raising of their children? Wilfred ended up leaving my grandmother in the early nineteen thirties. Were his war experiences somehow responsible and how did his leaving impact upon my mother's character? I am sure that some fragments of Wilfred and some echoes of Philip have filtered down to me.

One's parents have the greatest influence upon the forging of one's character. My parents met and married in India in 1945. Then they came home to properly begin their married life together  in England. Not in the Yorkshire market town of Malton where my father grew up, nor in the coal mining village of Rawmarsh where my mother was raised but in three villages in East Yorkshire where they had no roots or associations. My father had trained as a primary school teacher before World War II broke out and in 1946 was happy to accept the position of headteacher in a small rural school.

I  was not immune from all of this. Those past choices and experiences have drip fed into my own character.  I see that now. Though we are blessed with the ability to choose, there is a real sense in which we cannot help who we become.

45 comments:

  1. I think we may not be able to help what we become....but we can help what we do with it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You are so right. We are not entirely captives.

      Delete
  2. Both of my parents died when I was a child, yet I bear a number of their personality traits from the short time they were in my life. I raised a stepdaughter as my own, and she shares traits with me that my blood children don't.

    I had two Wilfreds in my life. It's a name I rarely hear anymore.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for sharing this knowledge of your own childhood Kelly. I can hardly imagine what life must have been like for you when your parents passed away.

      Delete
  3. I come from a musical background. My mother had a Singer sewing machine!😊

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No wonder you're so good on the triangle.

      Delete
  4. I heard a while back of a study on the grandchildren of holocaust survivors, many of whom had never known their grandparents, living with the same kinds of mental and physical conditions their grandparents exhibited on their release and through the rest of life. The theory is not that was programmed into DNA, but that environmental stresses change the way the chromatin in our cells reads and applies our DNA - and that this state of our chromatin is heritable, meaning that subsequent generations are in fact programmed to that stress.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Fascinating stuff Tigger. It very much fits in with my proposal.

      Delete
  5. An interesting post. I am not sure what effect my parents' characters had on my development, however, my sister's personality could be described as being the total opposite to mine and yet we grew up together, only one year apart in age.
    Perhaps there are some deep rooted similarities that we are not yet aware of.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. What we inherit may be like taking a handful of sweeties from a pick-and-mix. Siblings will grasp different hndfuls.

      Delete
  6. There's always a big debate about "nature vs. nurture" -- which traits are inherited vs. which are taught. I've always suspected that many of our behavioral traits and even thought patterns are more "nature" than we give them credit for being.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In the past I would have scoffed at that suspicion but now I know better.

      Delete
  7. I think about this a lot. Nature vs Nurture, in a way. There are so many of my own traits that I hope my children don't have to deal with but I know that some have passed on. But there are good ones, too.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hopefully more positive traits than negative ones.

      Delete
  8. We use the word inheritance in varied and flexible ways - genetically, culturally and financially being just a few - the respective idea of genes, values and valuables being passed from one generation to another. The three are closely (inter)linked in determining our life chances and advantages or otherwise - I have no doubt you will have seen this as a teacher!
    When it comes to sport - and with the Olympics upon us - I'm reminded of the aphorism of how to win a gold: 'train hard and choose your parents carefully!'

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Your last point made me chuckle but it is probably true.

      Delete
  9. We can diverge from the path but it takes self-awareness and strength to do so. I think that heredity is powerful and we're not always aware of how it affects it. Men of that generation didn't talk about war when they probably should have. Shell shock (PTSD) went untreated and they were told to just "man up." I can't imagine the horrors they must have seen and experienced.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Men who came home - like Wilfred and Philip - never figured in the casualty figures though they may in fact have been genuine casualties.

      Delete
  10. For no other reason that empiric family observation it seems to me that what we inherit from whom seems to be a complete lottery.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You are right there Graham. I had three brothers - all so different and yet some things were the same.

      Delete
  11. There is a new field of study called epigenetics which looks at heritable phenotype changes that do not involve changes to our DNA. Basically, the things that happened to our ancestors can affect how our DNA is expressed, thereby changing us. It's awesome and scary at the same time and would explain things like transgenerational trauma and it's effects. It's quite an interesting field of study.

    My dad fought in WW11. I don't know what he was like before the war but after the war he was an angry, sad, terrified man, until he died. I'm guessing it changed him.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I am sure your father never meant to do it but very possibly he passed some of that on to the family that followed him. You have taught me a new word today Pixie Lily - "epigenetics" - a fascinating field for future studies.

      Delete
  12. I think that with an awareness though, comes the possibility of change.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Change but not severance from the threads that bind us.

      Delete
  13. What a good, thought provoking post, Neil. I think about this stuff sometimes in relation to my own life. One of my great grandmothers came to the US from Poland as a teenager around 1905 (her future husband was another young Polish immigrant who came over around the same time). I wonder about her life before coming here, all the things she saw, what traits may have ended up in me that I'll never know anything about. I know that I take after that side of the family in basic temperament (personality), and my blood type is different than my mom's and my dad's--I have my Polish grandfather's blood type. It's unusual, but possible.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Maybe in the future studies will be better equipped to pinpoint how this inheritance business works. In the meantime, why not learn to dance a polonaise Jennifer?

      Delete
  14. Anonymous1:06 am

    As I become older I see traits of my parents in myself, often not what I really like, but some are good.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Of course they also inherited traits from their parents. We are like fish caught on a line.

      Delete
  15. So what characteristics do you see that you have inherited from a parent? I received my Mother's organization skills of piling things up until they became unwieldy and something had to be done. My dad as an unrealistic dreamer. Yes, there were positive traits. My Mom was very, very kind. My Dad was very curious.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My mother had a fiery temper and a keen sense of justice. She was very kind to those in need. My father was very patient and plodding. Like me he, used language with precision. He was also very community-spirited and did a lot for my home village.

      Delete
  16. Interesting post, YP.

    There are a lot of characteristics my mother has that I find myself showing as well, despite my best efforts not to. It's maddening and frightening in equal parts, to be unable to banish those things from myself.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. As I suggested - when I was younger I imagined I was myself, free from the connections I now recognise.

      Delete
  17. In recent years, I've begun to see my great grandfather looking back at me from the mirror. I never met him, but have his photograph. There is something in his expression that I now see in myself. It's quite a pleasant experience.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Perhaps you inherited more than mere aspects of his appearance.

      Delete
  18. One of my 70th birthday presents was a DNA testing kit which I did and sent away. The results that have come back have been most interesting about my genetic makeup and my distant relatives as well as what part of the world they came from.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Do you have a Viking heritage like me ADDY?

      Delete
  19. There is no one left in my family now to remind me whose traits I might have inherited. My parents were not close to their siblings, and I rarely saw any of my cousins. The closest contact we have as a family is the occasional email. In the past my mother would often remark that I was like one or other of my father's three younger sisters (whom she loathed) or one of his more distant relatives - equally loathed by my mother. As a young child, I remember asking why I couldn't just be me! So it's all a bit of a mystery really!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's funny with our little granddaughter. Some say she looks like her father. Others say she looks like her mother but I prefer to think of her looking like herself - Phoebe.

      Delete
  20. Your choice of picture with this postbis very apt.
    Like others and yourself have mentioned in comments and replies, siblings can be very different from each other even if, like my sister and I, they are not far apart in age (14 months for us), have gone to the same schools, had the almost same circle of friends etc. - in short, have generally had the same upbringing.

    ReplyDelete
  21. Sorry for the typo in the first line of my comment. I guess you still understand what I mean.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's all far more subtle that cloning.

      Delete
  22. I grew up despite by parents not because of them

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I would contend that it doesn't really matter what our relationship with our parents is like. We still inherit from them and previous generations too.

      Delete
  23. I'm a bit of a mongrel really woof woof. English, Irish, German, French and also eastern European Jewish. Do you have a pointy helmet?

    ReplyDelete

Mr Pudding welcomes all genuine comments - even those with which he disagrees. However, puerile or abusive comments from anonymous contributors will continue to be given the short shrift they deserve. Any spam comments that get through Google/Blogger defences will also be quickly deleted.

Most Visits