Twins - Binghamton,NY

Hi--I'm the Mom of identical twin boys, age 26. When they were small I did a lot of reading about identicals and basically came up with "no one knows" what causes them. And anyone could have identical twins, even if there are no twins in the family. Fraternal twins are created from 2 eggs being released and fertilized, therefore this is a female trait, and would not be affected by the presence of twins in the father's family..

Only fraternal twins run in families, not identical, and your boyfriend has nothing to do with whether or not you're more likely to release two eggs when you ovulate (thereby causing fraternal twins).

Only fraternal twins run in the family, identical do not. Since you would have to have two eggs ripen for fraternal twins, it can only run on the mother's side.

I have fraternal twins, but there is no history of it on my side of the family and I know a lot about my mother's side of the family for many generations. Someone once told me that probably there was someone in my family who would have had twins if they had had children, but never had any at all. I immediately thought of my grandmother's sister who never married or had children, but who knows... There is also an idea that women who are older sometimes release two eggs, but that is usually for women over 35 and I was 33 when I conceived them. Another thing I heard...many more people (including two people I personally know) are having a "vanishing twin" where you conceive two and loose one very, very early in the pregnancy. There is a theory that twin pregnancy might be a whole lot more common than experts previously thought and the reason for all these vanishing twins is because now we have technology to do early sonograms and detect the presence of these pregnancies. Which begs the question of how many people from our generation and the ones before us were actually conceived as twins?

Mothers side, But here is a great list of statistics about the chances of having twins..

http://www.keepkidshealthy.com/twins/twin_statistics.html

Identical twins are an "accident". I've even heard them refereed to as a "birth defect" because something happens to the egg and it splits in two (You can only imagine how that statement went over when it was made by a doctor at a Mother's of Twins Conventions! It was not pretty! LOL).

Only fraternal twins are hereditary, since the only way to get fraternal twins is for the mother to release 2 eggs at the same time. Therefore it must be hereditary on her side somewhere in her ancestors. And the hereditary gene can sometimes skip generations or appear every generation. But there is no way to predict when it will happen for either fraternal or identical twins. Even if they run in the family.

S.,
Twins come from us not the men. If your mother's side of the family has twins you have a chance of having twins. Depends on whether they are identical or not determines whether they skip a generation or not. So if your grandmother or great grandmother or your mother's sister had twins then you could have twins. God I wish twins come from the guys side, my father's sister had twins and I would have loved to have had a set of twins; I think twins are great.
Hugs,
T.

I have twins. Twins are a maternal gene from any generation on the moms side.

Identical twins can be from either side - the fertilized egg splits in two. Fraternal twins are only from the mother's side because the ovaries release more than one egg at a time. This happens more frequently as we get older and our bodies start pumping out more eggs because its "now or never" time.

yep, only fraternal twins have anything to do with genes and whatnot. identical twins, it doesn't matter cause it's like a freak incident with no possible calculations on anyone's probabilityof having them (odds are same for every woman) my mom had two sets of fraternal (me and my twin, 25 yrs old, and brother/sister twins, 9 yrs old). no history of them in the family till now :) but it's always the mom, never the dad.