Aspies For Freedom

i think its passed a a resetive gene on the x chromsone. from mother to all her offspring each carrying the possiblity for it or any of there offspring. thats how it can skip, and be more pevalting in the male gender.

edit the first 'a' should be as.

i think my materal great grand father had traits and even farther back,most  of the women of my materal family were or are sort of trailblazers, ecentrics most resently is my uncle. my pateranal family- count my father. and of course  me.

I've been looking back at earlier generations for a long time but only recently using my brand new Aspie glasses. There's oddities on both sides. Unfortunately I don't know much about my maternal grandfather as he wasn't married to my grandmother. The paternity issue was settled in court in the early 1940ies and mum grew up with her grand parents and to my knowledge never saw him. The whole issue was taboo. One didn't ask.

I would just like to add that there's nothing wrong with being eccentric or even odd, as every family has someone who is slightly out of place or unconventional in some significant way, both families with evidence of AS and families mostly NT.

There's lots of Quirky NTs, at least in my experience there is, and some even more eccentric than people with Asperger's Syndrome.

Are your uncle and cousin actually diagnosed, or self-diagnosed... OR do you highly suspect that they are Aspie?

Unless you have extensive letters, biographies, records of ancestors, how will you know if they have autism?  I know my grandmother had autism.  It was suggested to me that other ancestors in my family had autism as well.  I know I have one cousin with Asperger's and maybe more.  I just refuse to tell anyone in my family that I have it since it would likely cause me more problems than help.  I actually feel sorry for my cousin's kid with official Asperger's diagnosis because everyone goes on and on about it.

my grand ma talks about her father, hes sound a lot like me.my  father is suspected,uncle(materal) is suspected. and i know  my father side  becuase my grand-mother told me so.

I have a double whammy--Asperger's down both mother's and father's line. My mother's people tended to be eccentric geniuses, my father's, intellectual types... I ended up with moderate amounts of both traits and, of course, Asperger's. I'm really surprised I haven't heard of anyone with full-blown autism in my family; but then, I've only traced things back to the level of my grandmother's grandfather (who, incidentally, was a musical genius who could play any instrument, but couldn't tie his own shoes); so it could've occurred further back along the line.

my father line is abit hard cuz his father took his stepfathers name.i mean this litarly  not that he was adopted by said stepfather.my father is of german/welish decenant, though and AS-like traits are promanate on his side.(sp?)

I have looked through my family tree to check whether there were aspergian traits and there were none.
I am the only one.
A little accident in the past made me become an aspergian.
Accidents can also cause an ASD.
I am neither proud or ashamed of being aspergian; I accept the consequences for the accident that happened in the past.

My think I inherited my aspie traits from my father. Like me, he had some pretty obsessive special interests (making clocks, writing poetry and working with wood). He also had a quite profound interest in local history and in nature.

The rest of my family (my mother and brother) seem to share a narcissistic personality type and are quite dissimilar from my father and I.

I don't know anything more specific about my father's side of the family. We have a falling out. All I know is that they're very religious and (like my father) Irish.

Hmm, both my mother and father are far from the "neutral, stoic" or even highly eccentric types that all of you folks are describing.

My mother is highly empathetic and socially able... and not eccentric or intelligent.  But she is quite clumsy and also very fearful of many things, including environments she is not familiar with (she won't drive on the highway, etc.)  She is also very disorganized and literal-minded.  Possibly a mild Aspie?

My father had a serious anger problem where he would yell at the top of his lungs and throw things around the house, and I believe he also had an extreme kind of "black-and-white" thinking... I have been told that some Aspies think "black-and-white"... am I correct in this assertion?

However my father does fit the highly intelligent stereotype, and so do many members of his family...  My father was a chemist who enjoyed his work greatly and devoted himself to it much more than social life or even family, and he was often cold and egocentric.  The contradiction is that he was also narcissistic and a highly expressive person, who would express a lot of things with his hands, waving them all over the place in conversation.  The thing is though, he didn't seem to show much emotion besides anger.

Does any of this sound Aspie-like, to you folks?  I know you can't give me an informed opinion on my parents, but I would like some ideas.

Anyone else had a parent with anger/mood problems?

I would like to add that some Aspies can have a narcissistic personality type... probably in an idiosyncratic way though (for instance they wouldn't be sharply manipulative, or NPD.)

Every Aspie has to employ a coping mechanism for dealing with their "difference," and a touch of narcissism is one way this could happen.

I suspect both my parents had some Aspie traits. As dad was much older than mum, I don't know too much about most of his family apart than a likelihood that one of my uncles on his side could have had Asperger's.
(This was well before any official diagnosis could have been made and he died back in the 1980's). Another one of my uncles was very "frail" and died at 6 months, so there is no way of knowing how he would have turned out.

Mum says there were quite a few "eccentric" relatives on her side of the family and I have a couple of cousins and a niece and nephew, plus two brothers who are likely to be on the spectrum.

May I ask what that accident was?

I apologize if this is "too prying".. if it makes you uncomfortable, you don't have to tell me.

Anyway you look at it though, being Aspergian does not mean having brain damage.  The hereditary component rules out this hypothesis.  It's no more "brain damage" than a strong case of ADHD or OCD.