Did your ancestors fight in the wars?

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I've only had one direct ancestor in a war in the last 125 years, & that was on the more NT side of the family (WW2: supply line, including (& mainly) sending the dead home).

I'm a bit surprised by the number of us with family affected by WW2, but perhaps I shouldn't be. It was huge.

???? can ancestors include myself and late hubby....? Veit Nam ..? ...

Hm. Maybe not... I was thinking parents and older.

The context to the thread was me wondering about trauma causing epigenetic changes which could be inherited by children / grandchildren / greatgrandchildren (thinking of us on WP as being the inheritors rather than the soldiers).

If you have an autistic child we can can count your Vietnam experience.

But even if you don't vote, it would be interesting to hear your personal account of it. Feel free to tell your story here.

Both my Grandfathers were in the RAF one during WWII and the other during the Malayan Emergency.

There is definitely an element of intergenerational trauma regarding the Holocaust in my family. My grandmother was one of the most anxious people I ever met, and it made sense in terms of her experiences of being uprooted from her home, spending most of her teen years in refugee camps, and ultimately being sent to a Nazi death camp from which she barely survived, all the while witnessing some of the most monstrous acts imaginable.

The thing is, other people in the family, including myself, share some of the crippling anxiety she displayed, without having gone through the horrific experiences she did. Epigenetics could be a factor, as could environmental influences--being raised with that sense of dread, down through the generations.

Of course what I'm describing more concerns anxiety than autism per se.

There are no historical records nor accounts that any of my ancestors being a subject of displacement.
Nor involved in anything subject to war.

Likely because their origins as far as I looked are somewhat further away from warzones, actually.
Most of the wars that had occured in my current country are either around the shores, particularly on present major cities.

My ancestors are from the fields, away from the bays. If not that (in my mom's side's case), then in different islands.

Both sides had owned a land, most of which still are to this day, passed to their descendants (which is my todays's grand uncles and grand aunts or cousins few times removed), sometime around before the 1900s.

It's only more recent -- sometime at least a decade after wars, that some of their descendants moved out, settled in different regions and are now homeowners/married into different families.



I don't know.
My own intergenerational issues and family curses do not stem from war nor something like relational nor has a history of victimization/criminalization, but from domestics and household stressors.

Finances and generational poverty more particularly.

Anything else is either to do with natural disasters and bodily flaws, habits and attitudes passed down to descendants that everyone else seem to be a subject to.


But that is so, so common around here.
The country I lived in is a subject to colonialism and invaders.

Well, I guess my grandfather coming home with PTSD and severe OCD-like behavior surely did something to his family (children). But Dr. Asperger himself diagnosed my father (as a child) with not being autistic... (I think he is. Dr. Asperger told my grandmother that my father just adapted to the mental abuse by my grandfather. I think it was both.)

Anyways, we know Autism is mostly hererditary but always inborn, so would that mean that the trauma my grandparents had had in the war caused my father do develope Autism in the womb? Or me, because of the trauma my patents endured in their childhood?

All families in the world have some ancestor somewhere who was affected by a war. How far back does your theory reach? (I'm really interested, as to where you draw the line.) And what causes some people to be born with Autism, whereas others are born neurotypical? Especially siblings, for example...

That's interesting! Especially that your father was assessed by Dr Asperger.

To try and answer some of your questions:

I'm taking this as far back as great-grandparents, the reason for this is that a preliminary study (in mice) indicates that autistic traits triggered by epigenetic changes can be inherited to the 3rd generation. For the purposes of the poll, I'm only considering wars after 1900.

The actual process of inheritance I'm not entirely certain of, but it could be your grandfather's trauma affecting his sperm and hence being passed to your father and on to you, or it could be your father experiencing his own trauma around the time of your conception. Or your autism could have come from the maternal side.

I think your grandfather's PTSD is likely to be the major factor. Your father must have been suffering some kind of psychiatric distress to have been referred to Dr Asperger, even of not meeting the definition of an autistic disorder according to early understanding.

But there are many environmental factors involved in development of autism, so it could be something completely different.

I think your theory interesting as well...
Trauma at my conception: Shortly after Chernobyl happened. My mom was told to not conceive for the next 30 years... she became pregnant with me shortly after. Imagine... I'm 37 now... So if people would have stuck to this advise, there would not be any people in Austria between the ages of 38 and 7 XD
Though my Aspi-Cousin (daughter of mom's sister) was born 6-7 years before me... :$
So this pregnancy was surely not affected by Chernobyl...

I hadn't really thought about Chernobyl. Were your family in the fall-out area?
I think the radiation blew westwards (?)

We are located in Vienna. There is a celebration in Austria on 1st of May, they celebrate every year. To not disturb this celebration, the people were not informed about the danger until AFTER the 1st of May. It was raining that day. From clouds that built over the ruins of Chernobyl. So, yes... The location was affected.

People were told NOT to eat harvests from their fields, gardens or the forests in that year.
Though in hindsight, things seemed not to have turned out as horrible as people back then assumed. I think there were no reported direct health-problems following the incident in Austria... Increase in cancer-cases all over Europe are hard to be pinned on Chernobyl, since lifestyle has changed a lot in the following years and could also be blamed on those changes.

I jokingly say that I am a result of Chernobyl, since my mother tried to get pregnant for several years prior, but had no luck until Chernoby happened.

Miryl..the Daughter of Chernobyl...? Superpower of Resistance to radiation from birth ...
hope this is taken well...a positive affirmation of immunity to radiation?

I have all sorts of an ancestors that immigrated to America due to pogroms.

I am the real-life super-hero... XD I haven't discovered my super-power yet, but hey. XD Maybe we will find out during the next big fall-out when everyone else dies of radiation and I am like... "What you all talking about? I feel fine!" XD

I looked up about pogroms and we can count those. Displacement due to violence.
It's shocking how much hatred there was towards Jews for such a long time.