I then applied the same "Father's Genes" theory to occupations. The professional worker's children continued as professional worker, in nearly every census. It could also be said that professional people could afford to educate their children better than the manual workers.

Where a manual worker married into a professional workers family the children invariably became professional workers. I would like to point out that I am not biased towards professional or manual workers - but using the "Genes" suggestion to see if it could be applied to other statistics.

Of course it cannot be relied on 100% but it is an interesting theory.

Your feedback is welcome.

The relevance to Family History studies is as ChrisW has already pointed out, each of us can test this conclusion against our own findings, i.e. in our MEEK / BRAIN/ GWILLIAM/ WATKINS/ JONES/ etc trees do we see any tendancy for males with a larger no of brothers to father more sons than daughters. Then again we can choose to ignore this all together.

Personally - no parallels yet - but then it is a statisical finding :-)

regards

Just a load of rubbish

Date released 11 December 2008

A Newcastle University study involving thousands of families is helping prospective parents
work out whether they are likely to have sons or daughters.

The work by Corry Gellatly, a research scientist at the university, has shown that men inherit
a tendency to have more sons or more daughters from their parents. This means that a man
with many brothers is more likely to have sons, while a man with many sisters is more likely
to have daughters.

The research, published online today by the journal Evolutionary Biology, involved a study of
927 family trees containing information on 556,387 people from North America and Europe
going back to 1600.

"The family tree study showed that whether you’re likely to have a boy or a girl is inherited. We now know that men are more likely to have sons if they have more brothers but are more likely to have daughters if they have more sisters. However, in women, you just can’t predict it," Mr Gellatly explains.