To wonder at genetics

[TwittleBee]

Does anyone else wonder where you or another family member got their genetics?

I sometimes wonder about our son; where did he get his skin tone, hair and eye colour.

He is the only one of us to have straight hair with brown eyes and olive skin. He is almost all one colour, sort of this dark gold.

Meanwhile the rest of us are all curly haired, green/blue eyes with freckles with pale skin (including extended family on both sides)

The one thing my son and I do share is our eyes, we both have epicanthal folds and I always wonder where we got those as no one in my family has them.

No, no Welsh or connections to Birmingham that I am aware

it’s so random that we get it, one of my cousins doesn’t and none of our children do

My daughter has a “Mongolian” blue spot. No Asian heritage on either side of the family going back at least 8 generations! Baffling.

DS is DH’s twin, in looks and mannerisms. Now he’s the same age DH was when I met him I find it extra eerie! Then DD 1 is my double in looks but not personality, if you saw pics of us both at the same age you wouldn’t be able to tell us apart. Then DD 2 is a complete anomaly, absolutely no idea where she came from. She has red hair (i’m blonde and DH is dark) and her eyes are almost black (DH has hazel and I have green). She’s very similar to me personality wise though.

Perhaps you've forgotten your gcse biology? Brown eye genes are dominant so it's not that unusual for people with brown eyes to carry a blue eyed gene and pass it down through the generations til eventually a blue eyed child pops out.

Lately very much so. Recently gave birth to DC2 after a healthy uncomplicated pregnancy and birth only for them to be diagnosed with a rare condition. DC1 has a different rare condition. Neither are inherited or anything to do with parents. They are completely unlinked. And the odds of this particular combination are according to the doctors 1 in 70 million. We have been told we are just unlucky

This. In my extended family, there’s a sibling group of three; two of them are blonde and blue eyed like their dad and one is dark haired and brown eyed like their mum. So their mum obviously has a recessive blue eyed gene for that to happen.

I look far more like my father's sister than either of my parents. But my hands are like smaller versions of my father's even down to the bend in one finger.

DS is the spit of my maternal GF - has his build and dark wavy hair and even his personality- even though my mum really doesn't look much like him at all and I look much more like my DF's side so those genes lurked around undetected for 3 generations and then popped up!

Red hair colour is a recessive trait!

My dad has a little tiny bump on his right ear.
His mother had the same bump on her right ear.
I have exactly the same little bump on mine.
DS (only child) has the same bump in the same spot on his right ear.

DS is only 13 so we will have to wait, for a very long time hopefully, to find out if this continues for another generation.

My DS and her kids dont have it, but she favours my DM and I look more like my Dad.

DS is married to a twin, one of her sons looks almost identical to his cousin, but not very much like his brother, who looks more like me and my DS

I'm a mixed ethnicity person and both my parents are mixed as well, so there was quite a bit of 'which group brought in this' when I was young.

Some weird flukes of genetic with my kids:
My DD1 was born with a cluster of small dark moles, that as she grew merged together into one large mole that is identical to a birth mark I have. I now presume my birth mark formed the same way, no one ever discussed it.

My MIL was a third born child with eczema, my husband is a third born child with eczema and our third born child started having eczema when she was days old.

Same child was also born with thick red hair, like her father and grandmother, but it all fell out when she was about 4 months old and it grew back the same light brown colour her siblings have. In light dim enough that the red in my husband's hair is muted to a brown, they look like they have the same hair again (I have a few photos of this, I find it interesting).

My siblings and I look nothing alike. My children do not really look like their father or I, especially in skin tone or hair (I have charcoal-black hair, other than the greys), but they are nearly carbon copies of each other.

I'm South Asian, medium skin tone with jet black hair and eyebrows and brown eyes. My parents also have brown eyes but my younger brother has hazel eyes.

Married a british man with blue eyes and brown hair. His mum has blue eyes too and his dad green.

Our son has green eyes with a blue centre. He has dark brown hair and his skin is very milky coloured and pale in the winter and tanned in the summer. He has been mistaken for being Turkish even though my parents have mixed Pakistani/Afghan heritage. I also had a great grandfather who turned up in his village in Pakistan back in the day and never told anyone where he was from. I'd love to find out because that particular line of the family, whilst being born Pakistani, have different features.

My husbands family are so interesting too - mixed French and Scandinavian backgrounds on his mums side and english on his dad's.

Its so interesting.

My olive skinned Spanish friend gave birth to a very pale, white haired, blue eyed baby with white eyelashes and as the midwife cut the cord she said suspiciously "are you sure this is your baby?"

I've got a random ginger child myself, with only a strawberry blonde uncle on my side and a ginger brother on DH's. None of my other children or any of the nieces and nephews are ginger either.

It always intrigues me that when a couple have very different colouring some will have children that all look alike (my friend jokes that she didn't have 3 children she just had the first one cloned as all three of hers look very similar, a half way between her small, fair hair, blue eyed look and his tall with almost black hair, brown eyed) while her sister has one 'mini me' and one that is the image of her DH so one tall, brown eyed straight dark brown haired child, one short, with blue eyes and curly light hair. I know the science involved but it always fascinates me that sometimes similar genes will produce a blend of the parents while other children look so strongly like one of their parents. Mine look very much like their dad in terms of shape of features, build etc but have my colouring. Looking as DS is like look at a picture of DH as a teen that has had the brown eyes swapped for blue and dark hair swapped for fair.

I have a hereditary medical condition - inherited from my DM via a dominant gene.
She generously passed it on to all my siblings too.
I presume, though don't know for sure, that she inherited it from her DM, as she died at a relatively young age.
What I'd like to know is, where does it start?
Someone in the dim and distant past had to be the first to start off this chain.

I’m blue eyed blonde (even in my 60s) DSs father Brown eyed blonde (fairer than me) son was white haired with brown eyes. Now grown up he has very dark brown hair and brown eyes.

weird!

It was difficult to see who my eldest son resembled when he was a baby.

Until one day when my mum had been organising some very old family photos and left some of them on the kitchen counter. My SIL noticed it when visiting and asked her where I had the 'olden day photo' of my son taken.

The man in the photograph was my great grandfather as a child. My son is a young adult now and the resemblance to my mum is clear.

I know three couples who have a parent with red hair and a black parent and all eight kids have inherited the colouring of the white parent with the hair texture of the black parent.

It would start either a spontaneous gene mutation.

I know of boy girl siblings. He had dark hair, brown eyes and olive skin and his sister pale skin, blue eyes and blond hair.

There is a photo of my great great great grandfather that was taken in the 1870s.

You can't tell the difference between him and my uncle. It's absolutely uncanny.

More disturbing is the photo of my great grandmother which looks exactly like my mother. This great grandmother is on my PATERNAL side....

My ds doesn’t look at all like his dad, he’s the spit of his uncle!!! (No).

This is like me and my sister. Our dad isn't half Indian but he does have olive skin/dark hair/brown eyes. Our mum is pale and English rose-esque. My sister and I look nothing alike. She's even a good deal shorter than me as well.

Same w ds4. So much so that I'm glad his uncle was living on the other side of the world when he was conceived.

My kids are not that clearly siblings, though not completely disparate. None look like me particularly as adults. What I have found though is that at certain stages of life they were so much like me, but it didn’t last! Eg I have an age 4 photo that everyone thought was my daughter, not I and similar for their sibling at a different age - very interesting how they just had that moment in time like me - maybe just to confirm they were mine before they changed!