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UNUSUAL INHERITANCES

“You can’t take it with you” is an expression that means we can’t use our money after we die. For some people, it means don’t save and enjoy your money while you’re alive. For others, it’s a call to use money to help other people.

Many people choose to leave their money to their children, but that’s changing. Only 40% of millennials in the US are expected to receive an inheritance. Some parents expect to have no money left for their children, and others plan to spend it all on themselves.

Billionaire Bill Gates has decided to only give a small portion of his fortune to his children. The majority of his money will go to charity. He believes that giving his children money can weaken their character. Instead, he wants them to learn to be self-reliant. He has said, “It will mean they have to find their own way.”

Gates and fellow billionaire business mogul, Warren Buffet, are also gung-ho on not taking it with you. They are die-hard supporters of a campaign called the Giving Pledge. They encourage other wealthy people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to promise to give half or more of their money to charity before they die. Since 2010, over 80 billionaires have pledged more than 300 billion dollars.

The Giving Pledge is not a legal contract, and there are no rules about what kind of charity the money will go to.

Anything goes. Giving Pledge donors have chosen a wide variety of worthy causes. These include fighting poverty, disease and discrimination, along with education and environmental protection.

What is a worthy cause is up to debate. Take for example Jonathan Jackson, a man from Columbus, Ohio who died in 1880. In his will, he wrote, “It is man’s duty as lord of animals to watch over and protect the lesser and feebler.”

He left his money for the creation of a cat house. He also left detailed plans for the grand house. These included cat dormitories, a dining room, a clinic, an exercise room and even an auditorium for the cats to listen to daily live accordion performances. It’s unclear whether this house was designed for his own cats or a charitable effort for down on their luck cats.

There have been even stranger cases of people who gave away their fortunes at random. Archibald McArthur didn’t have two pennies to rub together as a young man in the mid-19th century. Later in life, he became a successful lawyer in Dodgeville, Wisconsin. He was known as a snappy dresser until he took a mysterious vow of poverty.

He threw away his fancy suits and top hats and gave away all of his possessions. He became a hermit who hung out in the local cemetery. In later years, he moved to Florida where he eventually kicked the bucket. In his will, he left $5 to each of his relatives and 3 million dollars to a stranger he met on a park bench.

Perhaps McArthur’s stranger on a park bench made a favorable impression on him, or maybe he did it on a whim. In the case of Luis Carlos de Noronha Cabral da Camara, a Portuguese aristocrat, it certainly was a whim.

He had no children or relatives and didn’t want the government to get his money, his houses or his luxury cars. Thirteen years before his death, he went to a notary and asked for a phone book. He then randomly chose 70 names out of the book and put them in his will. When he bought the farm in 2007, the 70 lucky beneficiaries learned for the first time of their windfall. Many thought it was a scam or a joke. Luis Carlos’s friend described him as having a sense of humor. She said, “I am sure he just wanted to create confusion by leaving his belongings to strangers. That amused him.”

Another prankster was wealthy Canadian lawyer, Charles Vance Millar. After he cashed in his chips, he left one of the oddest wills ever created. It said, “This Will is necessarily uncommon and capricious…what I do leave is proof of my folly in gathering and retaining more than I required in my lifetime.”

He left a vacation home in Jamaica to three of his friends who he knew hated each other. Sounds generous, but there was a catch. The three men had to live in the house together. He left some anti-horse racing activists $25,000 worth of stock in a horse racing club. He left seven teetotalers $700,000 of stock in a brewery. And he made a condition that they must participate in the breweries management.

The strangest part of his will became known as the Great Stork Derby. The rest of his money would be given to the winner of a contest to see who could have the most babies in 10 years. Over the 10-year contest, his relatives tried to fight the will in court. Being a lawyer, Millar probably expected this would happen. He made sure that his will was written correctly and would stand up to scrutiny in court. At the end of the 10-year contest, four women who had nine babies each split the $900,000 prize money.

Choosing to cut children out of wills in favor of charities, cats, or even random strangers is a personal choice. But some of the things we pass down are beyond our control. We all know that our genes determine our physical characteristics and to some extent, our personalities too. We inherit these parts of our identity from our parents, and neither they nor we have a say in the matter.

While our DNA is fixed, research into epigenetics is showing that things are not so cut and dried. We cannot change our DNA, but our bodies’ ability to translate that DNA into proteins is changeable. This DNA translation layer is called the epigenome.

Unlike DNA, it can be changed according to our experiences. And even more remarkably, these changes in the way our bodies translate DNA can be inherited by our children and even our grandchildren.

Professor Lars Olov Bygren of the University of Sweden has found an unusual connection between starving children and the health of their children and grandchildren. Olov grew up in the town of Överkalix in northern Sweden. He describes Överkalix as being data rich. The church there kept incredibly detailed records about the people there for hundreds of years. Names, birth dates, death dates, the causes of death, weather and historical crop levels were all meticulously recorded. Olov began looking at this crop data. He saw that over the years people there bounced back and forth between periods of near starvation and plenty. Harsh weather resulted in little food some years. And plentiful harvests resulted in full bellies other years.

Within this data, Olov found a strange link that stretched across three generations. If a boy suffered through near starvation between the ages of 9-12, his future children and even grandchildren inherited a health boost. And it wasn’t a small one. The grandchild of a man who had starved as a child was less likely to get diabetes and 25% less likely to have heart disease. And most remarkably, they lived an average of 30 years more. Olov and scientists who have reviewed his research agree that there is a clear connection between adolescent starvation and future generation health benefits.

Why this connection is happening is unclear. One theory is that during the ages of 912, boys are setting aside cells that will later be used for sperm. The chemical effects of starvation are somehow affecting the epigenome and getting passed down to children and grandchildren.

Whatever the reason, the results are clear. Children and grandchildren have inherited a healthier life from the suffering of their grandfather. This silver lining to grandpa’s childhood starvation does have a dark flip side. Boys who ate a lot during this critical age passed down a 400% greater risk of diabetes and a higher risk of heart disease to their grandchildren.

The idea that we can inherit advantages and disadvantages from our parents in the form of money or DNA is taken for granted. But according to one science writer, “this new field, “epigenetic inheritance”, has transformed our views of why we are the way we are.” Olov’s findings may only just begin to scratch the surface of how we are not only shaped by the DNA of our parents, but also by the experiences of our parents.